


The Echoes Between Us

by magicofthepen



Series: What We Choose [4]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Angst, Audio: Gallifrey: Time War 3, F/M, Missing Scene, Multi, repressing emotions until you can't repress them anymore, specific warnings listed in chapters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 03:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29128740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magicofthepen/pseuds/magicofthepen
Summary: As they chase Leela’s trail through the universe, Romana and Narvin struggle to bear the weight of everything they’ve lost in this war.A collection of missing moments from Time War 3.
Relationships: Leela/Narvin/Romana II, Narvin/Romana II
Series: What We Choose [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2137368
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a sequel to [Defying Reason](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29128212/chapters/71507184), [Call It Home](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29128548/chapters/71507934), and [Price to Pay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29128698/chapters/71508258); the main background is that Romana/Leela/Narvin were together romantically during the post-Enemy Lines to early Time War time frame, although Romana and Narvin ended up stepping away from the romantic part of their relationship shortly before Time War 1. 
> 
> This first chapter takes place immediately after Hostiles.

The TARDIS console is even more of a mess underneath. A great cloud of frothing white smoke hisses out when Romana finally manages to pry up one of the panels. The hot sparks flash and jump, stinging her fingers. She steps back, coughing at the smell of fried circuitry, wincing at the hot burn on her wrist.

“Well. That looks…promising.” Narvin squints at the mess from a few steps back.

Romana sighs. “The sooner we get this circuit replaced, the sooner we can get moving again. I’d rather not be stuck floating around in the middle of a war zone for any longer than we need to be.”

“Is there any part of this universe that _isn’t_ a war zone?”

She declines to respond, instead leaning forward to blow some of the smoke away from the equipment. Clearing her vision unfortunately doesn’t help much — the tech underneath is completely shot, bits of material fused together by the heat of the overloading machinery. They’ll have to somehow scrape it all out of there to even have a chance of reconnecting the new circuit to the TARDIS console.

“We need to pry the old circuit out of here first. Is there anything…?”

Narvin’s under the console before she’s finished speaking. There’s an ominous rattling noise, and he emerges holding a couple twisted bits of metal rather sheepishly.

“Not sure how much use these will be. I think they used to be part of the randomizer.”

He drops one of them into her outstretched hand and joins her on the opposite site of the slightly steaming panel, blinking at the objectively rather alarming mess of TARDIS guts in front of them.

“Not quite the quick replacement we were hoping for then.”

“No.” Romana starts prying a blobby bit of the old interior circuit components off of the panel. Teeth gritted, yanking strands of hair out of her eyes, but it’s certainly easier to focus on stabbing into the TARDIS console than anything else right now.

(Another Time Lord lost. Surely, if Romana had been more clever, if they hadn’t had to flee the imploding station so quickly, surely they could have found some way to save her that didn’t require trapping her in a time loop forever? Nothing was written in stone, and she might have failed to save her entire planet from crumbling into tyranny and ruin, but couldn’t she at least save _someone_?)

Romana shoves the train of thought to a dusty, dark corner of her mind. There’s nothing she can do right now except attack this melted patch of TARDIS console like it’s personally responsible for the terrible day she’s had. Finally lodging the strip under the melted bit of tech, she yanks — and a flurry of sparks erupts under her hands, burning against her wrist.

“Ow!”

“Are you alright?” Narvin pauses in whatever clattering he’s doing on his side of the panel.

“I’m fine.” She glares at the sparking bit of circuitry that’s fallen at her feet, running a few fingers tentatively along the burn points on her skin.

“Are you _sure_?”

She shrugs the edge of her sleeve down over her wrist. “A few sparks are the least of our concerns right now.”

He sighs. “Of course.”

They lapse back into a silence that’s only broken by clanging and clattering and the occasional muttered swear as they attempt to clear out a space to deposit the dematerialization circuit. It’s not uncomfortable. Not really. She’s only struck by how little time they’ve had, since they were first unceremoniously thrown off their planet, to stand side-by-side like this without imminently fearing for their lives. The last moment they’ve had like this was, well. Before the final Sicari invasion. Before the failed assassination, before the pair of them were shoved into a holding room and Narvin stared at her in mixed anger and disbelief, and she tried with everything in her to keep from breaking apart because she was so _sure_ that was the end, that she’d managed to kill both of them.

They should have several things to say to each other. There are several things churning inside of her now, questions she can’t quite bring herself to ask, apologies she doesn’t know how to voice.

Out of the corner of her eyes, Romana finds herself watching the methodical way Narvin dismantles the melted tech in front of him, prying and twisting and discarding with a quiet precision, his eyes narrow and focused. It’s the same kind of dedicated focus he gave to every mission she put in front of him in this war, every mission he took on in his own time. Every piece of work he’s done for Gallifrey his entire life, if she’s honest, and something in her stomach twists at the thought that after all his years of service, he’s here. Stuck in exile with her, in a TARDIS that they’re still hoping will dematerialize.

Romana turns her attention back to the panel, blinking away an odd stinging in her eyes. Her nails scrape against the console, and she barely notices when a smaller shower of sparks grazes the edge of her thumbs. 

At last, the discarded old bits of circuitry clutter the floor around them. Narvin cradles the new dematerialization circuit gently in his hands, as if it could break apart at any moment. He slips it in where the old one used to be, and the pair of them start the painstaking work of discarding any old burnt wires and reconnecting the circuit to the TARDIS’s central core. It’s nearly as slow as clearing out the broken, steaming mess from earlier, but a frantic motion underscores the way they fiddle and adjust the TARDIS components. They are so close to getting out of here.

Romana closes the panel with a firm click and runs a hand over the switches on the console experimentally, watching the lights dance and flicker under her fingers.

“It looks like it’s working.”

“Looks like?”

“We’ll have to give it a try, won’t we?”

Narvin presses the palms of his hands against the console. “And hope the TARDIS doesn’t decide to break apart in the middle of the Vortex?”

“Something like that.” Romana says, one hand hovering over the dematerialization switch. “Care to join me?”

He blinks at her, but before she can hurriedly walk back the offer because really, they only need one person to flick the switch, he’s taken two steps forward and curled his fingers on top of hers. Holding tight.

“Ready?”

“Not really.”

Romana lifts her thumb, curling it against the back of his palm. Raising her chin, her eyes flick to meet his with what she hopes is a defiant sort of glance. “Now.”

They press down together, and the time rotor _moves_ , rising and falling, wheezing and groaning. Her fingers press hard against the smooth curve of the dematerialization lever, as if the harder her grip, the more likely it will be that they successfully escape this patch of space-time and the decaying remnants of the battle.

The TARDIS groans, lights flickering and whirring around them. Narvin steps back and peers suspiciously at the navigation screen, which alternates between displaying a frothing gray fuzz and what looks like, as best as she can see from her angle, a jumble of time-space coordinates.

“Looks like we’ve successfully entered the Vortex.”

She grips the console. “Not blowing up then?”

“Please don’t speak too soon.”

But one microspan stretches out, then another, as they hurtle away from the wreckage of the _Dreadnought Septima_ , contortions of time and space writhing around them. It isn’t an easy flight, with the war-torn universe scraping and contorting around their flight path, time loops tripping up the TARDIS flight sensors, but it’s something. It’s _something_.

And besides, she once spent decades of her life hopping about in a mostly unstable TARDIS. It’s almost nostalgic.

Once they’ve finished a preliminary examination of the TARDIS’s stability, Narvin sits beside her with a large thud, both of them surrounded by odd bits of wire and metal and temporal elements, legs still dangling under the console.

“That’s as good as we’ll get,” Romana sighs. She runs a hand through her hair, sweeping the loose strands out of her eyes. “It’s possible we might not ever know exactly what parts of the ship Mantus manipulated.”

“So we could still have some nasty surprises in store.”

“Isn’t that how it always goes?” She leans forward, not looking at him, teeth chewing on her lower lip. “But these old models are surprisingly resilient. And now... ”

Romana can practically feel Narvin go still beside her. “We have so little to go on.”

“We’ve faced worse odds.”

“Have we?”

She wishes he hadn’t said that. She wants to contradict him, wants her to point out when they’ve been more lost, more adrift, more desperate than they are now. She _wants_ to believe that they have a chance. 

“You still have Mantus’s data stamp?” she says. “The one you mentioned, when we were — ” Locked in a cell together. Facing imminent threat of execution. 

The same despair that coiled in her stomach then threatens to rise up once more, and Romana shoves it aside, blinking hard. She can’t think about her failures on Gallifrey. Not now, not when there is still _some_ good she can do in this universe. 

“Yes.” She hears Narvin swallow. “But Leela’s biodata trail — there isn’t any readable information on the data stamp itself. It’s been corrupted or — or Mantus put layers of security passcodes into it, so it could only be accessed by a member of the IDU, I don’t know. I don’t know how they had information that we didn’t, and I couldn’t tell where she ended up, only…”

“Only that her biodata is still active.” Only that she is still out there, somewhere in the War.

Neither of them speak for a long moment, and she wonders if it’s sinking onto his shoulders too, the weight of their exile. The nearly-nothing resources they have available to them, the horror of what they’ve stepped into. Quatal. Trellick. A billion other broken battlefields, scattered across the universe. 

“Romana.” Narvin’s voice is nearly a whisper. “Do you _really_ think we can...find Leela?” 

He’s trying to hide it, but the jumbled grief and hope in his voice when he says her name is so raw that Romana nearly flinches.

“We can try. That’s all we can do.” She intends for it to sound confident. It really doesn’t. 

They lapse into silence again, the empty nanospans stretching out before them. A thick web, wrapping tighter around each of them, squeezing the air from her lungs. She should move — they both need to clamber to their feet, try plugging in the biodata trail and following it blind, try _something_ —

“What did Mantus mean?” Romana says suddenly. “About your lives.”

She didn’t think Narvin could get any more tense, but somehow he manages. He drums his hands on the TARDIS floor beside her, clenches them in his lap, shifts uncomfortably the closer she looks at him. 

“He, ah. When he offered me information on...on our friends, he made another offer as well. Trying to buy my loyalty.”

“You didn’t tell me this.”

Narvin sighs, a sharp hiss of air. “I didn’t.”

“Mantus offered to restore your regenerations.”

“Yes.”

“And you turned him down?”

Narvin winces. “Not exactly.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Narvin crosses his arms, as if that can shield him from whatever he’s about to say. “I wasn’t certain what else I _could_ do but go along with it. Besides, it wouldn’t have been terrible. I wasn’t planning on joining up with the IDU if I could help it, but I could still have used the situation to my advantage — ”

He’s stalling, avoiding the point. Romana nudges her elbow against his and watches him inhale slowly.

“But they didn’t end up doing it?”

“No, they...they did.” Narvin runs a hand through his hair nervously, still not quite looking at her. “The procedure had started. I interrupted it before it finished.”

“Why?”

He sighs loudly and his eyes dart to her briefly before settling on the pit under the console. “Because I realized where the next Sicari attack would be. And I thought I could still stop you from getting yourself killed.” 

His voice doesn’t have any bite to it, but she feels the sting anyway, the frustration that she had to go ahead and try to assassinate Rassilon, the frustration he won’t voice out loud.

“Narvin…” She stops herself before she goes any further. Now is not the time for this conversation, with both of them this exhausted. Now is not the time to bring up the other conversation they had, back when the war was freshly brewing on the horizon and she first learned of an old CIA mission to Skaro.

 _I never wanted you to save me_ , she doesn’t say.

It’s been many months since Romana was forthcoming with physical affection around Narvin. But after everything they’ve lost, reaching for his hand is automatic. He lets her lace their fingers together and squeezes her hand, holding tight.

* * *

“This looks promising.”

Narvin watches Romana peer into a plain, unmarked door in the depths of the TARDIS corridors. It does not look promising to him, and even less so as he cranes his neck around her and stares into what he can only describe as a cluttered, rather tiny storage closet.

“I’m not sure our standards for _promising_ are the same.”

“I’m not sure we can be picky about _standards_.” She shoves the door open wider and steps inside, plucking an item at random from the shelves. “We’ve got — ” 

“Decorative scarves?”

“Oh, shut up,” she grumbles, letting the swirling red garment flutter to the ground. “There _might_ be extra parts in here, or medical supplies, or at least something to wear that’s not going to get us immediately identified as Time Lords wherever we land next.”

She does have a point, about being noticed. They were lucky, with Trellick, lucky that the first point in space-time they crashed into held a Time Lord disconnected from Gallifrey, someone who knew _of_ him and Romana, but not that she had recently tried to assassinate the President, and they were cast off of the planet as traitors. They could still be recognized by appearance or bioprint, but wearing the ash-stained robes naming them as CIA agents when the CIA has now been disbanded is one way to get into a lot of trouble very quickly.

There’s enough trouble to run into during the Time War already.

But if there was anything on this ship that could help them to survive, it was probably purged before they were unceremoniously shoved off of Gallifrey.

“What, you think this TARDIS is hiding a secret wardrobe room?” Narvin mutters.

“You never know.” A handful of — wood carvings? — clatter at Romana’s feet, followed by three very dusty old books. “This is an old model. _Someone_ used it once, and who knows what they’ve left behind. People tend to...collect things, running about the universe.” 

Narvin spares only a moment to wonder if she’s thinking more of Braxiatel or the Doctor before sidling in beside her. It’s not a wide space, and they’re elbowing each other more often than not as they sort through the loose odds and ends, creating a disheartening pile on the ground that spills out into the corridor. 

He yanks at a piece of cloth _something_ wedged between one set of shelves and the wall and pulls out a sweeping length of silver-and-red fabric, some strange one-piece suit.

“Well, ah. This is certainly something.”

Romana glances over at what he’s holding. Her eyebrows climb to the top of her forehead, but to his shock, she holds out a hand.

“You can’t be serious.”

“It’s not _ideal_ , certainly, but if there’s nothing _else_ , it’s possibly enough to get us through a market stop without calling ourselves out as Time Lords.”

“A market stop?”

“Or something. Where else are we going to find supplies, if this TARDIS doesn’t turn up anything decent?” She eyes the pile of useless debris on the floor. “Possibly there’s something we could trade for clothing. Or a medi-kit.”

“You’re going to haggle in some market. Wearing _that_.”

Her eyes flash, and she takes a very deliberate step closer, the odd garment pressed between them. “I’ve found that I can be _somewhat_ intimidating, regardless of what I’m _wearing_.”

Narvin definitely does _not_ swallow. 

Her mouth quirks into something that’s almost a smile. It’s such a novelty to see amusement sparkling in her eyes, after _everything_ , and his hearts ache. 

She proceeds to elbow him in the side, which is less heartswarming, but he’ll take what faint glimmers of warmth he can get.

“Now get out of my closet.”

“ _Your_ closet?”

By the time Narvin returns from one last sweep down the set of corridors, poking his head in and out of a series of rather boring rooms (an office space, showers, what looks like an empty temporal gadget storage facility — really, what _was_ this TARDIS used for?), Romana is dressed in the ridiculous outfit he pulled out of the storage closet.

She tugs her hair out of the collar, sweeping it around her shoulders. The outfit is just as tacky as he imagined, geometric triangles of crimson and silver that shimmer slightly when she moves, long sleeves that trail past her fingertips in elaborate swirls of fabric. True, it’s arguably not more ostentatious than the average High Council robe, but it’s certainly not as inconspicuous as anything he’s worn at the CIA. The only problem is that the CIA _isn’t_ inconspicuous, not anymore. 

And the most unfair part is that somehow, absurd as the outfit is, it — well. He wouldn’t say it _suits_ her, but it doesn’t look absolutely _awful_ , when it's her wearing it. 

“It’s a little big, but it’ll do, I suppose.” Romana wriggles her hand in one of the sleeves, freeing it from the dangling fabric. “You’re lucky it wasn’t your size. Now that would be — ”

“Please. That is a mental image I do _not_ need.”

“Oh, but entertainment is in _such_ short supply in the universe anymore.” And there it is again, that almost-smile, and he can’t find it in his hearts to complain that it’s at his expense.

* * *

They find a heavily populated world on the outskirts of the nearest temporal skirmish, where the waves of distortion in the Vortex don’t reach as much. A world with a mixture of species crowding into its city streets. A place easy enough to disappear in and out of.

Narvin spends the entire time that Romana is gone staring blankly at the TARDIS manual pulled up on the navigation screen. He’s supposed to be studying up on the Type-50 in case something else goes wrong, but all the thoughts crowding into his head are _what if the temporal distortions do reach them here_ , or _what if the Daleks are hiding somewhere_ , or _what if some petty thief drags her into a fight, there could be any number of dangers that have nothing to do with the Time War_ —

He’s caught in a maelstrom of terrifying possibility when the TARDIS door creaks open. One hand reaches for a staser that isn’t there before it all catches up with him, and he exhales in relief as Romana steps back inside, arms full. 

“I was barely able to get any non-Gallifreyan clothes,” she says, dropping a shirt and a pair of trousers in his arms. “Sorry, not much of a selection.”

“Fashion is the least of my concerns.”

“That is not what you were saying earlier.”

Narvin sighs. “Fashion is the least of my concerns, as long as it’s not making us stand out _more_.”

“Mmm. Well, that's quite a crowd they have in the city. I doubt anyone looked twice at me.”

“I hope not.”

“But.” Romana sets down the other bag on her arm, frustration flickering in her eyes. “I wasn’t able to get a medi-kit. Everything was either definitely out of budget with what we had to trade, or not Time Lord compatible, or the shops were closed — we _could_ try somewhere else, but.”

“But it’s best if we don’t delay any longer,” he finishes in agreement. As a Time Lord with full regenerative capabilities, Romana will heal relatively quickly. And he’s survived a host of injuries — yes, mostly with access to some kind of medical care, but some _have_ been in a war zone, and really, cuts and bruises and minor explosions are the least of his fears right now — well below getting erased from existence, being exterminated by Daleks, and never seeing Leela again. 

“The other supplies are for mechanical repairs,” Romana adds. “Nothing complicated. The food machine, those sorts of things.”

Yes. Narvin’s reasonably certain the manual he was barely reading mentioned a food machine installed on every standard Type 50 TARDIS. It would be a pity, if after everything they’ve been through, if basic life necessities were the things to get them in the end. But, to be fair, he’s confident enough in his (and to a general extent, Romana’s) ability to engineer their way out of quite a lot of basic living issues, so he trusts they won’t have problems in that field. 

They both duck out of the console room to change, Narvin slipping into the empty office space he stumbled across earlier. It’s sparse in a way that should be comforting — his own offices were never cluttered — but instead leaves an unsettled feeling in his stomach. Who worked here? What other Time Lords walked these halls, settled in these rooms? What lives did they leave, what hopes did they have? What happened to them, when they left this ship behind?

The emptiness pricks at him, and he glances around automatically. He’s alone. They’re _alone_.

He’s spent the last many months looking over his shoulder, peeling away listening devices whenever he found them, trying to yank together any scraps of privacy he can. How long will it take for that suffocating pressure of Rassilon’s eyes and Rassilon’s spies to fade?

Truly, he doubts he’ll live long enough to find out.

Narvin pushes that thought aside and dresses slowly. The clothes Romana was able to barter for fit well enough, and the fabric might be slightly coarse but it’s not unpleasant. But after all these years, Narvin feels too exposed without the CIA tabard draped over his body. The robes had always meant so much more than the fabric holding them together — they were a sense of duty, of dedication, of _belonging_. He had promised his lives long ago to the service of his planet. Removing them is — well. It’s like admitting that he really is never going back to Gallifrey. 

A recent memory prickles in his mind — Trellick, acknowledging him and Romana as the senior leadership of the CIA. Probably the last Time Lord who would ever do so. It had felt — right and wrong, strange and incomplete at the same time. He couldn’t ignore that it was a deception, and yet a part of him insisted that he _was_ still part of the CIA, he would always be, no matter that Rassilon had broken his Agency apart.

Trellick had also called Romana his boss, and that — well. That has always been complicated. 

In the eyes of most of Gallifrey, who Romana was to him, personally, didn’t matter. Not really. Whether they were grudging allies or close friends or partners was not nearly as important as the roles they held in relation to each other. President and CIA Coordinator. President and Chancellor. Coordinator and Deputy Coordinator. His entire relationship with her has been littered with titles, gained and lost and rearranged, the deeply-held trust and warm affection between them carefully woven around the places they’ve chosen in their society. It hasn’t always been easy to navigate — he’s never had a relationship with a superior officer quite like his one with her, the professional and personal ties between them equally strong. 

And the final bit of strangeness settles on his shoulders — for the first time since he’s known her, Romana is — his friend. No titles. No professional expectations. 

Narvin tugs on the sleeves of his new shirt, unrolling and rerolling and unbuttoning the cuffs. He should be eager to step back out of this empty, empty room, to meet Romana back in the console room and start their search for Leela, as terrifyingly hopeless as it might seem. And yet there is something terrifying in a different way about facing her, a thick misery he’s felt in the air between them ever since they were thrown off Gallifrey together. He can see it all too well in her eyes — the same heartbreak, the same grief for the ties that have been unceremoniously snipped by their exile. 

As much as he didn’t want to risk everything for one survivor, he understands why Romana was so drawn to save another Time Lord today. They were, both of them, meant to protect their world and their people. If they had saved Trellick — it could have been _proof_ , in some small way, that they could still do that work, fulfill that duty. That even crashing through the universe, they didn’t have to leave Gallifrey entirely behind. 

Narvin folds the CIA robes carefully, eyes stinging, and leaves them lying on the desk. The door shuts behind him, a soft click echoing through the emptiness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during and after Nevernor.

The night sky of this world is a burning violet, deep and angry through the scuffed window on the side of the farmhouse. Romana’s eyes flicker to all corners of the room, tracing the outlines of the shadows on each wall as she tugs the blanket up to her chin. 

Behind the curtain, bedsheets rustle as Agata and Ivar climb into bed. Romana breathes in slowly and tries to let their movements become part of a comfortable background noise, not a disturbance that will send her pulses racing once again. As much as she told Narvin that it was worth staying the night, they are painfully vulnerable on their own, away from the TARDIS. 

She’s exhausted. She has been exhausted for longer than she would like to admit, every night in this war one of broken sleep or none at all, with CIA emergencies or old nightmares waking her even when she has managed to doze off. Sometime in the months since Leela’s disappearance, she stopped returning to the Coordinator’s quarters at night, opting to close her eyes on a small sofa in her office instead when she had a few microspans to spare. More than anything, she wants to let herself collapse, to curl into these blankets and sheepskins and forget everything for at least a few spans. But the unsettled feeling that something isn’t right here — it digs into her bones, and she jolts at every rustle and creak.

Romana rolls over and shoves an elbow under the straw pillow. But it doesn’t seem to matter which way she twists or turns — there isn’t a corner she can back herself into here, prepared for something to burst through the door at any moment. She’s untethered — stuck in the middle of this room, the curtain fluttering at her back, the empty floorboards stretching out beyond her fingertips.

Across the emptiness, Narvin is still except for the rise and fall of his breathing that she can just barely make out in the darkness. Her chest tightens — a flash of gratitude that he, at least, has managed to fall asleep. In these past weeks, Narvin has looked even more tired than she feels. She knows how much he’s poured himself into searching for Leela, and the others, outside of every other crisis and daily task they’ve had to navigate in this war. 

Her jaw clenches, and she blinks hard into the scratching fabric of the pillow. He shouldn’t have had to wear himself so thin, trying to undo the outcome of a mission he’d argued against in the first place. He shouldn’t have had to watch his world fall apart because she couldn’t win a simple election, couldn’t outmaneuver her opponents, couldn’t stop Livia and Trave from resurrecting an old mythical despot. And he should _never_ have had to choose between his regenerations and protecting her.

Why is it that _she’s_ always the one her friends are trying to shield, when she is infinitely less breakable? Why are they always the ones who pay the price?

This old farmhouse, with the strange woman muttering in the kitchen and the creaky walls and the single goat sleeping inside, is the closest thing to shelter Romana’s had in the war. Here, she’s expected to _stop_ , to _breathe_. It should feel like relief, but in reality, it’s every lonely, terrified moment of the past months catching up to her all at once.

She grips the blanket, fingers coiled and tight, but it isn’t enough to ground her. She has never been able to fall asleep easily since Etra Prime, and it was only easier when —

No. She can’t do this. She _can’t_ do this, not when she has to be rested and sharp in order to have the slightest chance of _finding_ Leela. It is wholly unproductive to miss Leela so much it hurts to breathe, so much that Romana is frozen in restless exhaustion. 

The space beside her is so painfully empty.

And it’s so easy to remember — the weight of Leela’s head nestled on her chest, the tickle of her tangled hair, the brush of her fingertips along the curve of Romana’s waist. The rise and fall of her breathing, the warmth of her skin.

 _It’s_ your _fault she isn’t here_. 

The accusation lashes out from her own mind, snapping these softer memories clean in half. The accusation she’s tried to suppress, because guilt isn’t productive either, not when Gallifrey needs her. The accusation that Narvin won’t _say_ , not in so many words, even though she knows he’s thinking it. 

He barely spoke to her for two weeks after Leela vanished with the Master. He was as professional as ever, sending her every update on the missions he was supervising and then some, deliberately diplomatic whenever he did set foot in her office. But for a while, it felt like — like she’d lost him, too.

She doesn’t know what changed. She never asked. But one day Narvin stayed after a debrief and told her about some of the probes he’d set up, scouring the universe for reports of Leela’s whereabouts. It was the first time either of them had spoken her name out loud since the initial chaos of her disappearance, and it was as if he’d thrown her a lifeline, as if she could breathe again. 

But —

But he still blames her, of course he does, and of course he’s right to, as much as she doesn’t want to think about it. And even as the chill in the CIA Tower started to thaw, nothing was the same between them once Leela was gone, it _couldn’t_ be, and —

Romana rolls over to stare blankly at the curtain instead. As if that will make it easier to ignore that the empty space between them is where Leela’s meant to be, where she _was_ on many of the nights when all three of them curled up together to sleep. 

She and Narvin, they could have so easily kept their lives separate, fearing that stepping into each others’ personal space could compromise their professional relationship. Leela was their tether — their _other_ tether, Gallifrey was always the first — the woman they both love who never cared about rules and expectations. The reason they accidentally found themselves spending more and more time together late at night, or in the early hours of the morning. Whispered conversations, cups of tea, another hand to hold.

She loved him — she _loves_ him — even if she’s never said the words, even if that’s not something they do. Even if she chose to stop spending time with him outside of work long before Leela was lost, because the he was her deputy, too, and the CIA, the War, had to be their focus (and because learning of the mission to Skaro, learning _why_ , had terrified her). 

Even if there are meant to be walls between them — she misses him, too. 

It is always easier to fall asleep when someone else is holding her, reminding her that she is still breathing, that she is not alone in the dark. 

Romana has slept alone every night since Leela’s disappearance. 

Here on an unfamiliar world, she curls in on herself, the thundering panic in her chest fading to a dull ache, and waits to drift off.

* * *

The TARDIS shrieks and groans when they try to take off from Njagilheim, and Narvin’s hearts nearly stop.

“What’s wrong?” Romana says, half-leaning on the console. They’re both still breathing hard after their sprint back to the ship with the Orrovix snapping at their heels. 

“I don’t know.” He skims the buttons and levers and readouts on the console, shoulders tense. “Probably the echoes of the temporal storm, tossing us about.”

“Can’t we do something about that?”

“With the limited control we have? Unlikely. We’ll have to ride it out and hope for the — _ah_!”

The ship jolts to the side, and Narvin loses his footing. His palms hits the floor first, and the impact ricochets through his body, setting his teeth on edge. 

Swearing under his breath, he sits up, still on the floor in case the ship decides to throw them again. On the other side of the console, Romana echoes his colorful language, wincing.

“The storm should be dispersing, yes?” she calls. 

“In theory it should have dispersed already.” Narvin wipes his scuffed hands on his new trousers, now coated with dust and grime from all the running. “But we must have caught the tail end of it.”

“ _Marvelous_.” Her biting sarcasm isn’t enough to hide a faint tremble in her voice. 

A pang of anger lances through his chest — they are so _close_ to getting on track to find Leela. Can’t this TARDIS hold itself together for _one_ microspan? 

The console room is still shaking, and the piercing wheeze of a struggling dematerialization reverberates around them. Narvin half-crawls, half-stumbles back towards the navigation screen, resisting the urge to drive his fingers into his ears. Romana’s clambered back to her feet, gripping the console with white knuckles.

“Any moment now,” he says through gritted teeth, watching the coordinates flash and spin on the viewscreen. _Damn it_ —

The screen gives a whirl suddenly, and the awful groan turns into the familiar sound of the TARDIS vanishing, slipping into the Vortex. The ship shudders one last time, and Narvin flings out his hands to grab either side of the navigation screen, hanging on as they careen off into the universe once more.

“Well.” Romana clears her throat. “That could have gone better.”

Narvin doesn’t have the energy to respond. Instead, he squints at the fuzzy approximation of a four-dimensional flight path and grimaces when it’s obvious that the last threads of the time disturbances are still trailing out on their tails. 

“We’ll have to wait.”

“I’m sorry?”

“To run a clean scan for Leela’s biodata. We can’t do it just yet, the temporal echoes are still there.”

“How long — ”

“No idea. Hopefully not more than a few spans, with how quickly it dispersed, but.” But no promises that anything in this universe would break in their favor. 

Narvin hurries around the console to where Leela’s biodata extract is hooked up to the navigation circuits and verifies that it isn’t trying to search. Not much use to be running a TARDIS system when they won’t get any results from it, especially when the ship is already barely capable of performing basic functions. 

Glancing up from the machinery, he looks at Romana properly for the first time in the light. Her face is extraordinarily pale, her jaw clenched, something between pain and fear flickering in her eyes. 

She’s still injured. And their original plan of walking back to the TARDIS in the morning was one thing, but being chased through the darkness was another altogether — she probably barely noticed any pain, running on adrenaline, but now —

Narvin takes two steps forward and catches Romana’s elbow. “Are you — ”

“I’m _fine_.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“They patched me up well enough. I’ll heal.” Romana shrugs, but it’s clear that she’s putting all her weight on her non-bitten leg. 

“You should at least sit down.” Narvin tugs her away from the console, ignoring her muttered sounds of protest. In his mind, he retraces all the rooms they found while digging through the ship for any useful supplies. There aren’t many furnishings, but there is a sofa shoved into a corner in the office space, and he guides Romana there, letting her grip his arm as she tries not to limp. 

Despite her grumbling, she sighs with relief when they both sink down into the tattered old cushions. The sofa is surprisingly comfortable for a piece of Time Lord furniture, and Narvin wonders idly if it also doubled as a bed for whoever last worked here. Romana stretches out her legs, biting her lower lip, and her hands flutter nervously at her sides.

“One of us should really be keeping an eye on the temporal energy readings,” she murmurs.

It’s a logical enough idea, and yet Narvin finds himself wanting to dispute her, unwilling to leave her here in this dusty corner of the ship alone. He remembers how the emptiness felt to him, how his pulse jumped and skin prickled when he was alone in here. And Romana looks jumpy enough as it is, a haunted look on her face that makes his throat constrict. 

“The console will alert us if anything changes,” Narvin manages, and he doesn’t think he imagines the quick flash of gratitude in Romana’s eyes. “We should take a look at your bite.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure what good that’ll do. We still don’t have medical supplies on this ship — ”

“But we should still change your bandages, yes?” He slides the tiniest fraction closer on the sofa, his own fingers hovering in his lap, wanting to reach out — to offer help or comfort, he doesn’t know, only that Romana still looks so _scared_ , and that terrifies him more than anything. It’s almost easier to focus on the physical wound. “And I’m sure we can find something around here to substitute.”

Narvin flicks automatically through his memories of their haphazard inventory, and the moment sharpens in his mind — Romana stepping into that tiny closet, and strips of soft fabric fluttering to the ground. The only problem would be the cleanliness, after being shoved in storage and tossed on the floor. 

“Give me a moment.” He shifts to stand, and as Romana’s shoulders tense almost imperceptibly, he reaches out a hand. A casual gesture, the press of his palm against her shoulder, but he lingers too long before standing. 

It doesn’t take him long to relocate the decorative scarves, although they are unfortunately far too dusty to be used as substitute bandages. 

_Would_ it be possible for the TARDIS to cough up another room, stocked with actual dermal regenerators? Or actual spare mechanical parts, or an actual place to rest, or — _anything_ really. Encouraging this transdimensional space to shift around them is a terrifying process, considering it’s barely coexisting with temporal energies and the Vortex as it is. And yet —

Narvin hurries back to the console room, sparing a quick glance at the feed of temporal energy. The noise is slowly clearing up, but they’re still not ready to actively scan for Leela’s biodata. He then turns his attention to the manual he was failing to read earlier (a day ago? several spans? even his sense of time feels muddled in here) and sighs at the rather convoluted and antiquated process for reconfiguring any part of the TARDIS interior.

The time winds of the storm are enough to fog their navigation, but not enough to do any harm. They’re not running any more TARDIS systems than strictly necessary to keep spinning in the Vortex. Surely, the TARDIS can cough up _one_ measly medikit. 

Narvin inputs the reconfiguration request — nothing so dramatic as a whole room, just a small addition to old things in the storage room. He’s more than prepared to delete most of the contents of that room actually, if it’ll help. And yes, there’s a small chance that whatever Mantus did to this ship could have completely sealed off that set of controls, but Narvin’s technical expertise outpaces most on Gallifrey, and with a few spans of actual rest behind him, he’s bound to be able to bypass the restrictions.

The TARDIS rumbles, a low murmur that echoes through the console room. His jaw clenches — surely, this simply request wasn’t enough to cause any major disturbance —

But fortunately it stops just as quickly, and Narvin lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Moving rapidly, before Romana has a chance to poke her head out of the office and ask him what exactly he thinks he’s up to, he yanks open the door of the storage closet to find —

— a roundish portable machine wobbling in between the shelves. A portable _laundry_ machine.

Narvin stares blankly at the device for several long moments. Definitely not what he asked for, but still _marginally_ useful when faced with a pile of dusty fabric strips. The coincidence of that is suspicious enough that he makes a mental note to run a diagnostic on the TARDIS telepathic circuits. Random bits of thought shouldn’t be enough to overrule the actual instructions he entered, and yet here he is, faced with a machine halfway between helpful and a practical joke.

If this is the result of one simple request, he’s hesitant to make another one. So reluctantly, Narvin shoves the old scarves in the machine, hoping it’ll wash and rinse them enough to actually work as a bandage substitute. The machine isn’t _awful_ ; he hadn’t noticed another washer on the ship, and wearing the same handful of clothes Romana traded for in the marketplace could get unfortunately unsanitary. But in the grand scheme of trying to stay alive and find Leela, it ranks low on the priority list. 

Narvin shoves his hands in his pockets and heads back to the office. In his absence, Romana has taken over the entire sofa, legs stretched out. Every part of her is tense — her fingers picking at nails, her eyebrows furrowed, the toes of her boots tapping together.

“Should I be worried about the TARDIS shaking again?”

Narvin scuffs his boot against the floor, still hovering in the doorway. “Ah, no. A minor issue. I’ve dealt with it. And I’ve also found some things we can use to rebandage your leg, once they’re clean.”

“How are we going to _clean_ anything on this ship?”

“Like I said. I’ve dealt with it.”

She arches her eyebrows, looking like she’s caught between scoffing and laughing. A smile threatens to spread across his own face, but then Romana’s eyes drop to her lap, the air of fragile nervousness returning, and any amusement vanishes.

Narvin crosses the room, hovering near the arm of the sofa, before Romana swings her legs back to the floor to clear space. He sits, and they don’t say anything, the low baseline buzz of the TARDIS surrounding them, broken occasionally by creaks and groans that aren’t quite concerning enough to investigate.

His hearts still feel like they’re beating too fast, even though they’ve left Njagilheim and its monsters behind. Is this what it’s going to be like, anywhere they land for any direction of time? The echoes of the Time War — their Time War, _his_ Time War — snapping at their heels. Even if they can trace Leela through the Vortex, it’ll be a miracle if they make it to her alive.

It’ll be a miracle if she’s still alive by the time they reach her.

Just the thought of Leela truly being gone from the universe is enough to freeze his hearts, a pain racing through his chest like broken glass lodged under his ribs. Narvin banishes that thought just as quickly as it surfaces. He has to have a reason to keep stumbling forward through this maelstrom. He can’t _think_ about the alternative.

As he tries to yank himself out of the panic spiral, he notices that Romana’s breathing is just as sharp and controlled. He doesn’t know if she’s still shaken by the Orrovix, or if it’s her own fears of how their quest will turn out driving this bout of anxiety, but there’s only so long he can bite his tongue, seeing her so openly rattled.

“Romana? Are you...alright?” 

It’s the wrong question. She’ll ignore it, or she’ll assume that he means her physical injury, or —

She buries her head in her hands and doesn’t answer for a long moment. Narvin is still, his hands clenched in his lap.

“No,” she says finally, tipping her head to glance at him sideways. “Are _you_?”

It was a ridiculous question, and he knows it, and she knows it too. 

“Not really.” Narvin’s fingers curl and uncurl in his lap, and he stretches his legs out, tapping his toes together in a mirror of her position.

“I wasn’t expecting — ” Narvin swallows, throat dry. But he has to keep talking, or else the silence will return, thick and strangling. “ — I hadn’t realized how far the Time War reached.”

“Neither did I.”

“And the Orrovix — ”

“I know.” She sounds miserable.

“Romana — ”

Her eyes meet his, flaring briefly, before she drops her gaze.

“I was scared, Narvin,” Romana admits. “I didn’t — there’s a lot worse to be afraid of in the universe than the Orrovix, but — ”

“They _were_ hunting you.”

“I know, but I —” She makes a low, frustrated noise. “I _panicked_.”

He gives a muffled snort, at that, and Romana stares at him in a mixture of confusion and hurt.

“What —”

“You really think you’re the only one?” His fingernails are digging into the palms of his hands now. “The Orrovix, the _Dreadnought Septima_ , even just hopping from one place to the next, not knowing where we’ll end up — _I_ certainly don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Narvin —” The expression on her face is startlingly heartsbroken, but she swallows whatever she was about to say. 

“I don’t know how to do — _this_.” He flaps his hand in a vague gesture that’s meant to imply the words _TARDIS_ and _running_ and _unknown_ all at once.

“And you think I do?”

“At least this isn’t your first time as a renegade.” And there it is, the panic he’s been trying to force down since Mantus first shoved them both in a broken TARDIS. Everything he is has always been tied to Gallifrey, and now he’s more adrift from his purpose, his _duty_ than he’s ever been. Even when they were stuck on the Axis, their missions still orbited around Gallifrey — the hope of saving it, or of building a new life in a distorted mirror of their world. His planet was his lives’ work, and to lose that — he’s caught in free fall, scrambling for something left to hold onto.

“That was a long time ago,” Romana says, voice low and almost angry. “And I always had the choice to come _back_.” Her voice breaks on the last word, and Narvin feels suddenly awful. He hadn’t meant to question the validity of her grief, but seeing her look as lost as he feels — it only makes it harder, to find his lifeline in the dark. 

He has needed Romana’s confidence too much in these past months. He’s relied on her fearlessness when challenged by Rassilon, and her relentless ability to stand her ground in the face of an increasingly powerful War Council and then IDU. She has been — _magnificent_ , and _brave_ and yes, sometimes infuriating in her stubbornness and her boldness, but she was the rock he needed to stop himself from being swept away as Gallifrey crumbled around them both. As the war spiraled rapidly out of their control, _his_ control, as he sunk into a perpetual state of panic, she was _there_ — never judging, but always reminding him that there _was_ still hope, that they _could_ keep fighting.

When they were thrown in a cell together, Narvin watched that magnificent confidence shatter all at once. It was almost more devastating than believing they were about to die.

The realization sinks into his stomach. Ever since their exile, Narvin’s been searching for that same old courage to return to her eyes. He’s pinned his need for something to stop his free fall entirely on her, but he’s made it a burden, not a kindness. He hasn’t wanted to accept that she’s falling, too. 

“I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely, almost too quiet to hear.

Her shoulders slump. “No, _I’m_ sorry. It isn’t _your_ fault that we’re…” She trails off, as if unable or unwilling to express how hopeless their current state of affairs is.

Narvin has never considered himself particularly good at comforting. He can barely articulate his own feelings at the best of times, much less truly understand what someone else needs to hear. If Leela were here —

His eyes sting. If Leela were here, she would interrupt these uncomfortable silences. She would know what to _say_ , she would hold him and Romana close, wiggled between them on the sofa with her head tucked on Romana’s shoulder and her arm curled around his neck. She would be a warmth in the cold fragility of this war-wrecked universe. Their lifeline in the dark. 

He can’t be Leela. He can’t say the right things, he can’t hold Romana close enough to feel her hearts beat against his — they don’t _do_ that, not anymore. Not since the war began and she learned of its origins. Not since she decided — they both decided — that their feelings for each other weren’t allowed to matter any longer. 

Except he has never been good at putting that particular box of feelings away entirely. And a growing, aching part of him wants so desperately to hold her, to be held in return. He wants tell Romana that he’s hurting and she’s hurting and he doesn’t know how to fix this broken grief between them, he doesn’t know how to fix the fact that they’re both more terrified than they’ve ever been, but that there has to be _something_ that will help, because he needs her.

Because he loves her.

But it’s too late for any of that. 

Narvin closes his eyes before the tears that are swimming out of reach spill over. He breathes slowly, the air trembling in and out, and gradually unclenches his fists.

When he opens his eyes, Romana isn’t looking at him. She’s turned away, shoulders hunched. 

He could leave now. He could check the temporal scans again or the scarves washing in the storage closet. But he doesn’t want to leave like this, with everything still so strained.

Ever so gently, Narvin reaches across the space between them and takes Romana’s hand in his. 

She startles, snapping to face him with wide eyes that shimmer with unshed tears. Narvin can’t speak, can’t offer any real comfort. This is the closest to a lifeline he can give — squeezing her fingers tightly in his, reminding them both that they’re still alive. 

Romana makes a noise halfway between a sigh and a sniffle, and before he can react, she slides closer and buries her face against his shoulder. 

He’s glad she can’t see his face. The awful, broken feeling he can’t contain, the quieter longing he’s still trying to. 

Narvin’s gripping Romana’s hand more tightly than he means to, but somehow, as one silent moment after another drags on, she tips her head to rest gently against his shoulder, and her breathing slowly evens out.

This — her falling asleep on his shoulder — is all too familiar ground. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes there were late night reports they were reviewing in one of their quarters, or in Leela’s, and the time of night and the dull material lulled one or both of them to sleep by accident. The memories are warm now, moments from a simpler time when he woke up groggily on the sofa with an ache in his neck when Romana accidentally elbowed him, and they argued about whose fault it was in quiet whispers while Leela slept in the next room. 

Narvin gives in to the nostalgic ache, gives in to the weariness that’s still pressing down on him, even after the sleep he did get last night. He doesn’t move, doesn’t shift the careful balance of Romana dozing on his shoulder and his hand in hers and the uncertain space still between them. But he breathes out slowly and lets his eyes close, waiting for the TARDIS to alert them that they’ve cleared the temporal storm.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place sometime after Nevernor but before Unity. Content warning: psychic trauma.

Following a biodata trail, even when it’s clear from the temporal disaster that is Njagilheim, is easier said than done. 

The endpoint exists (it _exists_ , Leela’s still alive), but too many space-time points in the universe are in flux now. Caught between them and Leela are a million changing moments, from the tiniest nudges in the personal histories of individuals to cascading changes that make galaxies go dark. The universe is a minefield, and they’re following a rippling string through it and trying not to get blown up.

These past months are heavy on Narvin’s shoulders — they’re getting closer, but not fast _enough_ , and the universe is cracking apart around them, and every time they open a door onto a world hollowed out by the Daleks (four times), or a screaming temporal echo no one but them can see (five times), or a world shrouded in fear, its people knowing something’s _wrong_ even if they don’t yet know what’s coming (three times) — every time he’s paralyzed for a moment by bitter horror at how far the ripples, ripples _he_ cast, have spread. 

During one of their space-time tumbles — calling them flights would be inaccurate — they landed on a space station and stole a handful of generic medical supplies — bandages, skin patches, things that can’t go too badly, no matter your species. Romana left a handful of tiny glass sculptures from the odd TARDIS storage closet as a sort of payment. They both glanced back as they left, at the old bits of art no one wanted, at the bitterly inadequate apology. 

They take turns sleeping on the sofa in the old office space. Narvin shoved his old CIA robes in the corner of the room and tries to pretend they’re not there, crumpled echoes of the past hiding in the corner. Even when he’s supposed to, he can’t sleep — the room is too dark or too bright or too loud or too quiet. Even when he shoves the couch into a corner and keeps a staser set to stun within reach (not that it will help much against the kinds of things that could breach a TARDIS, it’s just nervous habit), his skin prickles with the sensation of being watched. He digs his nails into his shirt sleeves and can’t relax — Romana’s at the console, alone, and _anything_ could go wrong —

From the shadows under her eyes, she isn’t sleeping much either. 

They’ve had more close calls, too — a trigger-happy arms dealer who was either trying to sell to them, kidnap them, or quietly burn through the rest of their lives, a screaming desert storm that nearly separated them from the TARDIS for good, a time loop that kept them running through the same old garden for nearly a day before they extracted themselves. 

In an ideal universe, they wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t have to go planetside. But between needing supplies, and getting spat out of the Vortex ,and having to stop to recalibrate their navigation circuitry, and the TARDIS needing to recharge far more than even this old of a model should, it’s been stop-and-go. 

They’re in the middle of a _go_ when things get rocky again.

The ship starts to lurch, like it’s swaying side to side except the Time Vortex isn’t supposed to be behaving like an ocean. Narvin clambers off the couch, inhaling several deep breaths as his now-standard headache sinks in. When he arrives in the console room, he isn’t surprised to find Romana underneath the console — it’s more likely something will go wrong than not on any stretch of their journey, and fiddling with the machinery is a way for both of them to keep busy. What’s new is that she’s asleep, head slumped against a closed circuit box, limbs curled awkwardly into a ball. In spite of the rocking journey, Narvin’s loathe to wake her — that isn’t a comfortable place to rest. She must have been exhausted, to fall asleep like that.

But when he starts flicking on the navigation screen, Romana stirs, wincing as suddenly jolting upright connects her head with the underside of the console.

“Narvin? _Oh_ — ”

“We’re lurching.”

“Yes. I — ” She makes a noise between a groan, a yawn, and a swear. “I didn’t mean to doze off on you.”

“I fell asleep out here last night,” he admits, flicking another lever.

“Apparently we should have traded sleep schedules.” Romana ducks out from under the console and clambers to her feet, rubbing the top of her head. “What is it this time?”

Narvin shuts his eyes, thumb pressed to his forehead. “We’re not moving.”

“It certainly doesn’t feel like we’re not moving.”

“I mean, in the Vortex. We’re a bit — stuck."

“Wonderful.” She nudges his shoulder, shuffling sideways so they’re both peering at the still slightly frizzing navigation screen. “But it looks like —"

“Yes. It isn’t the ship this time, probably. There seems to be a temporal distortion between where we are and where we’re going, and normally the vast regions of the dimensions would be enough to avoid it, but — "

“But this is the Time War, and so we can’t go over, under, or around it.”

“Over, under, and around isn’t how I would have — "

“I was speaking simplistically, Narvin.” She sighs. “Give me a moment, I just woke up.”

Staring at the screen, the writhing mass of distortions condensed into a simple two-dimensional image and a series of equations — Narvin imagines this is what literally hitting a wall feels like. They could try to see if the biodata trail would latch onto a point other than the next one on their trail, but the tracking is already tenuous at best, and if they force it to scramble into an out of order sequence, it could get messy. Messy like latching onto Leela’s past instead or mismatching the biodata or — there are any number of ways they could lose the trail if they try to sidestep this place, and the ache of exhaustion tightens around his chest, a cold numbness seeping from head to toe.

“We have to go through it.” Romana stares at the screen, making an effort to sound more alert.

“With the size of that thing? We barely escaped Njagilheim! There’s a reason we’re stalled in the Vortex.”

“And what other options do we have? If we let Leela’s trail get scrambled — "

“I _know_ ,” he says, and the words break in his mouth, and Romana turns her head away quickly before he can see the look in her eyes.

“That isn’t an option.”

“Something went wrong here.” Narvin swallows. “An echo of a battlefield, timelines too scrambled — there’s a part of this galaxy that is like walking through broken glass, and we don’t know if this TARDIS can handle that level of abrasion. I don’t know what would happen if — " If they got twisted up in it too. Would they end up caught in a time loop, unable to escape? What jagged cracks could end up lodged in their own pasts, pasts that trace back to Gallifrey and the heart of this war?

But his voice sounds hollow and unconvincing even to his own ears. The sheer despair of the alternative — dislodging themselves from Leela’s trail, perhaps giving up hope of ever finding her — is too overwhelming, too much to imagine.

Romana almost laughs. “I don’t think we ever thought this journey would be free of risk.”

He wants to keep arguing with her, but it’s because he wants someone to argue with _him_ , to lend credence to that voice in his head telling him that flinging forward on their path no matter the risk shouldn’t be done, it can’t be done. But there’s another voice, quietly practical but desperate for a solution, that’s starting to insist that if the Time Lords were on their trail or had a way of tracking them that he and Romana hadn’t found, dodging through a whirlwind of inverted and broken timestreams would be one way to avoid them. And it’s not like there’s a patch of this universe that offers safe travels; they could step back from here and fall directly into a different star system rippled by paradox and never escape.

Narvin has been quiet for too long, perhaps, because Romana turns back to him with a questioning look in her eyes. He nods once, slowly, and she exhales.

For the next several moments, they work in companionable silence, completing a series of basic maintenance checks as the TARDIS stalls and shudders and rocks in the Vortex around them. There’s been no change since their last repairs, which is partly reassuring and partly concerning, because at the rate the ship is having malfunctions, they’re just about due for another one. But when Romana dusts herself off, satisfied enough, and Narvin pulls down the console panel with a mixture of anticipation and unease stirring in his stomach, they start the painstaking process of convincing the TARDIS that yes, it does need to move forward into a temporal disaster zone.

The whole ship groans and shudders as they move around the console, fiddling with the controls, trying to get the ship to properly rematerialize — or even properly dematerialize. Pick a point in the maelstrom and aim for it. Pick another one and keep going. Try to ignore that those points keep fluctuating, that even the nature of the disturbance itself is unstable, timelines devouring each other whole or fracturing into pieces. The exhausted numbness in Narvin’s chest is starting to feel like something more, a paralyzing revulsion against the _wrongness_ of this patch they’ve stumbled into, half-in and half-out of the Vortex.

“It’s moving!” Romana shouts from across the room.

“It’s doing _something_ ,” Narvin mutters, and the rocking is only getting worse, that skittering from side to side that means he’s forced to cling to the edge of the console just to keep steady, a horrific rumbling rattling up from beneath them. 

And he’s the one facing the doors, so Romana can’t see it, the single flash of something white and twisting from outside-inside. He must look horrified because she turns — and then it doesn’t matter at all because his stomach seizes and his voice jams in his throat and something has drawn a line in the center of his vision, carved it into two cracks and let both of them crumble into pieces, and then —

Narvin wakes.

Or he’s dreaming. Or something else entirely because no _waking_ has felt quite like this — like stepping through the shattered glass of a mirror, the world scraping at his insides and contorting around him to create a picture of the TARDIS that looks _almost_ right, except it feels so wrong he wants to run, wants to throw himself out of this place, except there’s nowhere else to go.

He’s alone.

Stuck in the unreality of it all, that fact takes a moment to sink in, and when it does, Narvin is hit with a fresh wave of horror. The possibilities crowd into his mind: _what’s happened to Romana or maybe it’s what happened to_ him _that’s the problem and she’s either gone or alone and he_ —

And the world shifts.

It’s quiet. A brightening of the light. A loss of the smell of burning smoke from under the console. A disappearance of the patchwork scuffle of mechanical repairs sticking out from the console. One layer peels over the world, then the next, then the next, until Narvin’s standing in a console that’s either new or close to it.

The last layer is the most chilling — a figure appears, dressed in simple Gallifreyan robes with violet trim, hair long and floppy, beard buzzed short. A Time Lord Narvin does not recognize is standing at the console, and they appear real enough, but when Narvin dares to extend a tendril of psychic awareness, there’s nothing there. Nothing but a — a reconstruction? An old memory?

The Time Lord is speaking, but the words are scattered into the air, left meaningless before they reach Narvin’s ears. He stumbles forwards, presses his palms to the edge of the console and the sensation that ripples through him is one of the odder ones he’s experienced — Narvin can touch it, but he is one step removed from the experience. As if he’s replaying a memory in his head of what the smooth, cold press of the material feels like against his skin.

The Time Lord walks away, towards him, and Narvin backtracks, not wanting to find out what would happen if he and the memory of whoever used to use this TARDIS crossed paths, two different timelines occupying the same space.

 _Where’s Romana?_ The worry thumps in his chest, spiking through him anew with every beat of his hearts. _What has this place done to her?_

His thoughts are still muddled, but that is the closest thing he has to a grounding force — one goal, one mission, to keep him from sinking into this scattered old memory like it’s a dream. His hurried footsteps away from the Time Lord leave him resting where the figure vacated — in front of the navigation screen.

The picture on it is meaningless — he can’t concentrate on the image. But even though he’s a step out of sync with the TARDIS, the TARDIS _is_ still here, and perhaps if he nudges, he can push it back on the right time track. Maybe if he succeeds then Romana will spring back into being, perfectly fine, wondering what happened to him when he suddenly vanished from the console room.

Touching the screen, the console — it’s still odd, detached, like Narvin is watching from the outside. But if he concentrates, he can shift one of the console panels, enough to expose the telepathic circuits. The images around him fritz and skitter as he does, the Time Lord and too clean console dissolving and reconstructing before his eyes, again and again, and again. But as Narvin presses his fingers against the telepathic system, he tries again to send out that psychic nudge, to meet the blankness he encountered with his own insistence that something should _be there_ , the TARDIS is real, it is real and temperamental and falling apart, and this past is gone. Narvin can’t be here. He doesn’t belong here.

Something reacts.

All at once, the navigation screen flickers into life and he can see what’s on it — but it’s alternating between a dozen or so things he knows are impossible — the coordinates and environmental readouts for Ysalus, wartime data on Skaro that’s bound tightly in the CIA records back on Gallifrey, the last messages he received from the CIA agents on Hailessa before the world was torn apart by Daleks unraveling the timeline. These images are sharper, less muddled, than anything else in this room, and yet they are secure or time-locked information that should never have left Gallifrey. Mantus would never have _let_ this information leave Gallifrey.

The roiling in Narvin’s stomach increases and the world flickers to blackness again, briefly, and he realizes —

His own voice echoes out because instead of sending him back to the present moment he belongs in, this TARDIS, this disturbance — it’s tapping into _his_ memories. The TARDIS flickers back into being but it’s not right, there are too many levers and switches and in-depth data readouts on the screen. A modern TARDIS console flickers into existence around him, his proper one from his years as Coordinator and Deputy Coordinator of the CIA.

Narvin can’t see himself, but the sharp bark of his own voice is distinctive, echoing somewhere from this room.

_“I can report, definitively, that the Daleks are in full occupation of the world of Hailessa. The fleet of time ships has created a barrier around the edge of the system that our battle TARDISes cannot enter. It is…unknown if there are any survivors on the planet.”_

His voice sounds so tired, even back from the early stages of the War. But there’s a note of finality that’s missing — back then, he still wanted to believe that there was a way out of this conflict. To believe that if meddling with time could start a war, it would be enough to undo one.

The screen flickers to life in front of him, and he watches the blue-violet world of Hailessa disappear under an onslaught of Dalek ships darkening the sky, sucking the planet dry of its people to stage a new base of operations. The Daleks tried that a lot, early on, claiming one planet and one point in time after the next, marching forward, marching closer to Gallifrey. But as the time-strewn nature of the war caught up to everything, the Dalek encroachment became more complicated. Battles would disappear. Battles would be fought twice, three times, half a dozen times.

On the screen, Hailessa is so distant. Such an early loss from the war, this burning world.

His head pounds. His eyes are watering, the echo of this memory driving into his skull.

 _Full occupation. Unknown if there are any survivors._ Is someone out in the universe giving a similar report about the Time Lords?

The world shimmers again, and _breaks_ —

And it’s the TARDIS after he trapped Ysalus in a time lock, the world frozen but still alive on the readouts, echoes of his voice and Eris’s floating around the console as they rush back to Gallifrey. And then it’s the trip into the Death Zone, Agent Karla pacing by the doors, and if only he’d realized what she planned to do, if only he’d stopped Rassilon’s resurrection, Gallifrey might still be _Gallifrey_ —

And then the memory is a bit older, well before the War, and the readouts on the screen take a moment to place. It wasn’t a particularly interesting mission, the one to track down the Monan selling dangerous time skippers, but they had hovered on the edge of the galaxy after alerting the proper authorities of their retrieval, and Leela had insisted that they leave the doors open for just one more moment, just long enough to watch the stars swirl and the streaks of dust and debris drift peacefully through the universe for another breath.

He can’t help but look. They’re silhouetted in the doorway, the echoes. Hand in hand. As Narvin watches, frozen, the almost-Leela, the ghost of Leela ( _no, don’t think of her like that_ ) rests her head on his past self’s shoulder.

The world is wrong, broken, and yet if he waits a little longer, if she turns her head, he can see her smile again. And maybe if he tries hard enough this fracturing place can swim deeper into the happier moments of his subconscious. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst way to die, surrounded by the best of his life.

_Die._

Something’s nudging at him, a rejection of that notion, an insistence that he had to find his way back, _back_ (where is back?), he has to find — he has to find —

_Romana._

He jolts, struck by this moment of clarity in this maelstrom. Narvin steadies himself against the rush of _everything_ threatening to overwhelm him, against the headache leaving his muscles trembling, against the onslaught of _wrong-right_ —

The psychic landscape is a mindfield here. It’s already turning his own memory inside out, picking it apart for his own — entertainment? Torment? But there is nothing to cling onto, no tether back to reality, so all he can do is reach out and try and _try_ —

_Romana, please._

(The world breaks before Leela can turn her head.)

_Romana, where are you?_

Narvin is half-slumped against the console, except is the console itself even real anymore, or is it part of one memory, or the next, or the next? Romana’s voice flashes out briefly, but it’s hard and accusing ( _another memory, one that will haunt him no matter what she says about forgiveness — the look in her eyes when she learned about the mission he authorized to Skaro_ ), and then her voice is more tired than he can bear ( _another memory, after she learned why_ ). They twist inside of him, cold and rotting, these memories he wish didn’t exist because then this _War_ wouldn’t exist, because then they’d still have their life on Gallifrey, him and her, and — 

He slumps to his knees. The floor is cold and unforgiving.

_Romana. Romana, please._

* * *

The last thing — first thing — last thing she remembers is falling.

Or was it flying? Or running? The world cascades and snaps around her and then she’s blinking her eyes in a corridor that is almost the TARDIS, except even their TARDIS, breaking apart as it was, wasn’t awful enough to crush her memory of how she got from one point to the next and leave her stranded with her head burning and her muscles trembling in the middle of a dark hall that leads nowhere in both directions.

Something _snaps_ behind her, and Romana jerks, her whole body trembling. There’s nothing there, nothing there, but that’s how it was on Njagilheim too, the world looking so deceptively nice and simple and harboring monsters. A similar thread of panic is twisting its way up from her gut. She never stopped thinking about that world, never really left behind the throat-constricting terror of being haunted, of being _chased_.

It’s one of the oldest fears, isn’t it. You can keep running for years, but there’s always that one thing that can outrun you, that will strike you just when you slow, look away, falter.

She presses up against the wall, fighting against an onslaught of dizziness. There is a voice murmuring in the distance, and it doesn’t sound like Narvin, but —

_Narvin._

It’s one thing if something outruns her, and quite another if it outruns _him_. She has failed everyone who ever trusted her, and he is the last one by her side, and she can’t bear the thought that this might be _it_. That she might have failed him so completely, so suddenly, that they both get to die alone in the dark.

Every step is a fight against the head-swirling nature of this wrong-TARDIS, every step threatens to tip her upside down, scatter her into pieces. Romana draws her awareness in, tries to concentrate on nothing more than the huffing of her breath and the quiet air around her. In, out. In, out. Wait for something to make a move from the shadows.

In, out. In, out. _In, out. In out. In out in out inout inout inoutinoutinoutinout_

The world snaps clean in two.

Romana groans, and her back is pressed up against the wall in a brightly lit corridor. The whole thing is fuzzy around the edges, the outlines of doors and the intricate curved designs of the floor blurring and shifting and squiggling all around her.

She slumps backward, and her head thumps against the wall, and there’s a scream in the distance. It might even be her own, she’s far beyond able to distinguish those sorts of things.

Is that what’s happening here? Has her consciousness been unceremoniously tossed elsewhere, while her body is quietly murdered? Or are the screams a memory hovering just out of reach, or a vision of what could be?

Does it even matter, if she can’t fight it?

The corridor breaks, reforms, and she’s half-sick with the wrongness of it all. Footsteps pass by, far more determined and certain than they have any right to be. Faces she doesn’t know swim in front of her, and Romana curls her knees to her chest and hides her face.

The screaming fades into a dull background buzz, a high pitched shriek echoing and looping, the drumming of footsteps around her fading into normalcy. She could have sat there a moment or a decade, her nails biting into the skin of her palms, and something sharp and heavy is pinning her shoulders down and she’s shaking and a thousand accusations drum around inside of her — 

_Exile, disgrace, her world burning because she couldn’t save it, the people she — the people she loves dying in pain and alone because she has never been any good at keeping them safe —_

_ Romana. _

_She’s never —_

_ Romana. _

It’s so dim, the faintest glimmer of another conscious mind out there in the dark, but even the flicker of its passing lessens the pain pushing her into the ground, paralyzing her in place. It’s the closest thing to a breath of fresh air she can find in here.

She lifts her head.

_Romana. Please._

He’s alive. He’s still — and that thought is enough to send a rush of strength into her legs that she didn’t know she had. Enough for her to stumble to her feet and keep dragging herself back down the corridor, only this time she has a direction to pick. Like following a scent on the breeze back to its source.

_Romana._

The whole world is this long, stumbling hall and her ragged breath (in, out), and her own name dancing on the edge of her consciousness from a mind that isn’t her own. The world is shaking around her, threatening to break, threatening to reform, and she is pushing against it, jamming it with everything in her.

_No. Not yet._

The faint mental signature grows stronger with every step even as the details of the world around her grow fuzzier, blurring into an unreal memory. There’s still a screaming somewhere off in the distance, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t _care_.

Her hearts are thrumming too fast, and the gasping breath in her lungs is wheezing too short, and that sharp pain is lancing through her shoulders again, and her knees want to buckle more than anything, except _no_ , more than anything she wants them to _keep moving_. 

Everyone always said she was too stubborn for her own good.

When the world bursts into an odd sort of light, it’s all at once. One moment she’s in a blurring, cracking corridor and the next she’s in a console room that can’t seem to decide what kind of console room it is, standard Type 110 and CIA and battle TARDIS configurations blurring together with old bits of the Type 50 that’s all they have left to call home, and Narvin is kneeling on the floor, fingers pressed to his skull, and he is the most real thing here.

“Narvin.” She isn’t sure if she speaks his name or thinks it, but he startles, jolting upright to stare at her with a wide-eyed mix of relief and disbelief. She doesn’t blame him for the doubt, what with the world unstable around them both.

Romana stumbles forward, and Narvin moves to meet her. Any moment now the world is going to crack, and it might try to throw both of them apart again, but she won’t let it. She won’t let it.

“Romana.” He’s standing in front of her, her name an exhausted exhale. “Are you — "

“Real?” She half-laughs and the ship lurches, and she grabs his arm, to steady herself as much as anything. Narvin’s hands land on her elbows. “I think so.”

“I think,” he swallows. “I think so, too.”

The world is rumbling even more violently around her, the console room flickering from one reality to the next, like cracked shades of paint peeling away and away. Romana doesn’t want to know what’s underneath. She can feel Narvin’s mind humming at the edge of her awareness, and he is the only thing she’s sure of right now, and she _needs_ —

Romana throws her arms around him.

Her hands clutch too tight at his shirt, her nose pressed against the curve of his neck. Before she can move, Narvin makes a choked noise and swallows, and then he’s holding her tight enough to steal her breath, one hand on her back and the other sliding into her hair. Almost without noticing, his mind is in hers and hers in his — not a deep level of contact, but enough to know that they’re there, that this is real, even if the world around them is crumbling from one memory-fiction-unreality to the next.

Narvin’s breathing is too quick, too shallow, and she doesn’t know if it’s from fear or if he’s actually hurt.

“Are you — " Romana breathes, throat dry. “Narvin, are you alright?"

“I’m fine,” he says, and it comes out like a gasp. “Romana.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t.” He’s struggling for the words. “Don’t disappear like that.”

She tries to laugh. She does. “I don’t think either of us is in control right now.”

“I — " And his next words aren’t spoken, they’re a rush of feeling bubbling up to the edge where his mind is linked with hers, the _terror alone reaching remembering despair hoping alone alone alone —_

Romana curls a hand against his hair, around his ear, without thinking. _It’s okay_ , she says, but whether thought or spoken they both know it’s a lie. 

She breathes in, shaky. _I won’t leave you alone, I promise. I_ promise. 

Narvin sighs, and at first Romana thinks it’s in relief, but she nearly topples to the ground as he slumps against her, eyes fluttering shut.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place immediately after Ch. 3.

_No._

Romana staggers under Narvin’s weight but manages to stay upright by stumbling backwards into the console. His breath is shallow, and when she presses her palm to his cheek it’s too warm.

“Narvin.” Her voice shakes. “You’re going to stay awake.”

He’s not quite unconscious; his eyelids flutter and he groans. She doesn’t know if he was struck by the same wave of that dizziness and pain that pinned her to the ground in the corridor, but she wishes she was the one hit now. It’s so much worse to watch Narvin struggle to regain control over his own consciousness.

The world is still breaking and reforming around them, one TARDIS layered on top of the next on top of the next. Behind her, the console refuses to stick to one shape, pushing her forward and collapsing back as it changes the length of its panels and the sharpness of its edges. It’s like being buffeted by wind from all directions, and Romana wants to scream into it, wants to let go and let it carry her away. Maybe if it wasn’t for Narvin, she would.

The edges of his mind are still tangled with her own, and she can feel his thoughts dissolve into static and then crash back in pure bursts of fear or anguish or determination. Overlaying every emotion is a deep-seated exhaustion that’s so overwhelming her knees buckle underneath her.

But if she sinks to the console floor, if she lets herself curl up and shrivel like she did in the hallway, she doubts she’ll ever resurface. The time eddies are swirling and snapping around them, but she has enough awareness left to know that the TARDIS _is_ still moving through the wreckage of old timelines. There is another side. There has to be. There _has_ to be because she can’t have done it again — pushed the people she cares about to take risks, insisted that they’ll make it, only for the universe to rip them away.

“You’re not getting stuck here.” She doesn’t know if Narvin can hear her, but it doesn’t matter. It’s probably better if he doesn’t — if he can’t hear, she won’t have the opportunity to let him down even further, break the promises she really shouldn’t be making.

Narvin’s mind swims back to consciousness, and he gasps and digs his fingers into her shoulders, hard.

“Hold on.” Romana’s trying to sound confident, sound detached, and failing to sound anything like it. “It’ll be rough for a little longer, but then you’ll be fine. You’ll be _fine_.”

He groans. “Can’t you — can’t you _feel_ it?”

“Yes,” she whispers. _And I nearly gave in, but I heard you calling, and —_ And it must have taken an unreasonable amount of mental effort for Narvin to push back against the time eddies, to search for her psychic signature. All she had to do was follow the trail, but he was the one setting it, stripping down his mental barriers to cast his own mind into the screaming void of this place.

No wonder he’s struggling to stay awake, to stay on his feet.

Narvin makes another pained noise and drops his arms to brace his hands on either side of her, against the console. She bites back a sigh of relief as his slumped weight slips off her shoulders — he can support himself, just barely. 

“I’m not sure what we’re caught in,” Romana admits. “But it doesn’t feel like a loop.”

Narvin shakes his head, managing to choke out a single word. “Memories.”

“Memories? Whose memories?”

His eyes flicker around the room, and he takes a heavy breath that shudders through his body. “What’s left in this TARDIS. Mostly. I — " He struggles for breath, and Romana reaches out, alarmed, before curling her fingers back into fists. Narvin is still nearly pressed up against her, but that fraction of distance is suddenly insurmountable. The longer they’re talking, the more she’s remembering that hugging each other in a time-wrecked ship isn’t something they _do_ , not anymore. She needs to make sure he’s stable, but she shouldn’t have — she didn’t _mean_ to.

A thread of anger coils through her, a distraction from Narvin’s condition. As if this ship hasn’t done enough to try to throw them off course, to break them apart, to delay their journey, it’s now spitting out echoes of the past, time sick memories that leave them both struggling under the onslaught of temporal _wrongness_?

As if on cue, the world around them shudders into something more stable. A single console room, with a single figure pacing back and forth. Marginally better than the chaotic jumble they were in before, but Romana’s skin is still crawling — they shouldn’t be here. _Here_ shouldn’t be here.

“I’ve seen this one before.” Narvin still sounds more drained than she’s ever heard him. “I don’t know who that was — a diplomat, perhaps?”

“I’m not sure it matters.”

“Maybe it does.” He doubles over, coughing. “Or we wouldn’t keep seeing it.”

“It’s just this TARDIS. It’s — " Romana stops herself before she says something silly, like _haunted_. And yet, they’ve been running into the ghosts of this place all along. Someone else sat on that couch, maybe even slept on that couch. Someone else fiddled with the console. Someone else collected all those items in the closet.

A diplomat, maybe. It makes sense as a reason to have a TARDIS this well-worn — there aren’t many jobs that require regular trips off world. But whoever used this ship, they must have been an ambassador for Gallifrey before Romana’s time — she would hope that her memory hasn’t faded that much, that she would still recognize the Time Lord if they were someone who served in her administration. And the model of the TARDIS, not much newer than the Doctor’s antiquated Type 40, suggests an older time, too.

Why should it _matter_? Why does it have to matter — she has enough to worry about without needing to stare at the old figure of a Time Lord who’s probably dead by now wandering about the console, speaking words they can’t hear, entering data for a mission they can’t read. They aren’t _important._

It hits out of nowhere, a rush of something like anger punching into her stomach, and Romana’s nearly slammed back against the console by the weight of it. Something’s pressing against her chest, trying to suffocate her, and she can’t — she _can’t_ —

And then it lifts, no longer trying to strangle her but simply hovering in the air, a great swath of emotion that has no source and no meaning —

Narvin’s eyes are wide, and she realizes he’s clutching at her elbow too tight, struggling even more to hold himself upright.

“What _was_ that?”

And then the TARDIS shifts.

The look on Narvin’s his face is caught between longing and horror. She doesn’t know why, until it hits her that the look of the walls, the bit of the console she sees when she turns her head to the left — it’s the standard CIA model. The standard model for _their_ time, far past whenever this TARDIS was decommissioned.

“I tapped into the telepathic circuits before,” Narvin says, and Romana doesn’t understand the confused misery in his voice until she turns her head and sees an echo of Leela standing facing away from them, her shoulders shaking with laughter as a ghost of Narvin splutters in embarrassment.

Romana can’t place the moment in time. There were any number of missions over the years that the two of them carried out independently. They worked better as a team than most career agents, the bonds between them a strength, not a liability. Their methods did come into conflict, yes, but they fundamentally trusted each other in a way that was rare to see in the CIA, among people who’d built their whole career around the idea of lying and backstabbing and carefully manipulating the universe. 

(Romana liked to think she left a positive impact, getting agents to trust each other more, to work more as a team. Narvin insisted she was going to get a bunch of young, naïve Time Lords killed because not everyone had her luck at escaping dangerous situations.)

It’s easier to dwell on that thought, to turn over her own memories with careful detachment, than it is to process that she’s seeing Leela in front of her for the first time in months.

She hears Narvin swallow, and something shrivels in her stomach. This is _his_ memory, a happy one at that, and she’s intruding. Romana jerks back, dislodging Narvin’s arm from the console enough to stumble a few steps away, her eyes pinned to her feet.

 _I’m sorry_ , she doesn’t say. It wouldn’t help. It doesn’t matter that she regrets Leela’s disappearance; it only matters that they find her. It only matters that Romana makes things right.

But she can’t help sneak another glimpse of Leela, the way her hair shines under the too bright lights of the TARDIS console, the quick flash of a smile when she turns her head to the side — Romana only realizes when her respiratory bypass kicks in that she’s stopped breathing.

There are other words that dry on her tongue. _If I could trade my life for hers, I would, you know. It doesn’t matter what happens to me as long as both of you are_ safe, _are_ together —

Saying that wouldn’t help either. Narvin has several character flaws, and one of them is caring very much whether Romana lives or dies, despite everything.

She’s so frozen in place, that the next wave of anger actually does force her to her knees, submerging her under a deluge of _wrong broken trapped screaming_.

Romana flings out an arm, reaching for the console, for something to pull against, brace herself with, and collides with Narvin’s shoulder. She’s gripping tight, and suddenly his hand is over hers, sliding their fingers together. They won’t be flung apart again.

 _Trapped, broken, time scattering, shattering, falling,_ falling —

The onslaught of pain, it’s — it’s too strong to be a memory. It feels real, it feels like a consciousness struggling and raging against her own, except there isn’t anyone here on this ship except her and Narvin —

This ship.

Romana gasps, the breath wheezing out of her body. The _TARDIS_. These haven’t just been arbitrary memories stuck in this place. Whatever that old time was, the diplomat wandering the halls, it was like Narvin’s memory of Leela, a much-missed time of peace. It was —

And it hits her suddenly — their TARDIS, this broken down ship that’s caused them nothing but trouble, it was ripped apart and rearranged, its ability to freely travel the Vortex twisted and warped. It was a casualty of Mantus’s cruelty, of Rassilon’s regime, too.

 _I’m sorry._ The thought crashes through her, except this time it doesn’t go unheard. The anger falters slightly, enough for Romana to wonder — was shoving the echo of Leela in front of them an effort to make them understand? To make them feel some of the same pain the TARDIS is feeling now, as the currents of the temporal disruption rip through it, and it loses itself in what-once-was?

She had always been skeptical of how the Doctor treated his TARDIS like an old friend. True, she knew the consciousness of these older ships could grow increasingly independent — she’d even encountered the consciousness of the Doctor’s TARDIS directly once, corrupted by anti-time. But she’d never felt such a strong rush of _emotion_ from a time ship before, emotion that rushed through her and threatened to leave not just her mind but her body unsteady.

The feeling — _trapped pain pain pain breaking_ — swells again, crests and crashes, and Romana squeezes Narvin’s hand and tries to hold onto herself.

The world goes dark.

Narvin’s breath hitches, and the pain, the raging storm, lessens in their shared mindscape. The ache of the temporal wrongness is still sinking deep into her bones, but dealing with that is easier than bearing her own revulsion to the time storm and the TARDIS’s revulsion at the same time.

And yet, the weight of the ship has settled in her mind. Romana’s certain it hasn’t let her go entirely.

Narvin’s grip on her hand softens, his thumb tracing the curve of her knuckles, and it’s enough. It’s enough to ground her.

_You don’t have to do this. Narvin’s memories, my nightmares — you don’t need to keep rifling through them to hurt us. Believe me, we can feel the guilt, the loss already — every person, every world._

_I’m sorry. I’m sorry that we didn’t understand that the Time Lords hurt you too. I’m sorry, but we’re not the ones you want to be angry at. And we have to get out of this disturbance, and if you’re using the distortions against us that isn’t helping any of us escape._

_Escape._ The word lingers in her mind. The consciousness of the TARDIS is difficult to read but there’s an undercurrent of despair, a sense of futility inside her, that isn’t just her own.

Another wind, another ripple of contorted time, strikes into the ship. Romana stumbles sideways, colliding with the console, and Narvin collides with her, muttering an apology. Her breath is sharp, ragged.

_There is no such thing as escape._

Romana can’t distinguish her own thought from the TARDIS’s. It echoes out, reverberating. She slumps forward, eyes flickering shut. 

_No_. The wave of revulsion is sharp and unexpected, and she remembers suddenly that Narvin is looped into this shared mindscape — that Narvin, in fact, is likely strengthening the connection between Romana and the TARDIS, since he was the one who tapped directly into the telepathic circuits. He can hear the push and pull happening between them. He can _feel_ it.

Narvin has never been an optimistic person, but what ripples out from him isn’t optimism, not really. It carries with it all the resignation that’s eating Romana inside, all the certainty that the universe is dying and none of them have much time left. But the emotion resonating from him is familiar, because it’s the same adrenaline kick that rushed through her in the console room when he collapsed against her. They’re going to die out here, certainly, but not yet.

_Not yet._

_Please._

For a moment, there’s no response from the ship. But Romana can still feel it rooting around inside her head, and when it settles, still, she still doesn’t know what it was looking for.

For a reason she can’t quite explain, Romana stretches out her free hand into the dim, shattered, unreal world around them. Maybe it’s only a symbolic gesture, but maybe it means something nonetheless.

_You control your path through the Vortex. The Vortex doesn’t control you._

_Please._

She waits a long time, or maybe very little time at all. Enough time for her headache to reach truly splitting levels, enough time for her arm to shake, enough time for Narvin to clutch her wrist and pitch sideways, fighting once again to stay alert.

_Please._

The world goes bright.

The light is a shock, too much all at once, and Romana flinches away from the glow. But when she blinks her eyes back open, they’re standing in something that’s almost the TARDIS console she remembers from the ship. There are still indistinct murmurs coming from down the hall, still the flutters of old ghosts hovering out of the corner of her eye, but at least it’s not their personal ghosts anymore. The TARDIS has turned its attention elsewhere.

All the air rushes from her body in one exhale, and Romana sways, dizzy on her feet.

For a long moment, neither of them move, both leaning forward against the console, both struggling to catch their breath and fight back against the time storm-induced headache that’s still raging. All they can do is wait it out now, and wait they do, until mercifully, the stomach-twisting, head-splitting _wrongness_ starts to recede.

The ship shudders, but it feels like relief, and the last lingering weight in her mind vanishes.

The consciousness of the TARDIS is still there, just out of reach. It isn’t technically bound to them — this isn’t their ship — and yet Romana has more of a mental connection now to this TARDIS than she’s had to any in all her lives, even the one she spent decades traveling the universe in. The weight of that anguish, the sensation of having her mind picked apart, the despair, the surrender — none of that will be easily forgotten. All harsh reminders that they will never escape the cruelty of the Time Lords no matter where they run in the universe. That cruelty has been with them all along, preventing the sentience of the TARDIS from running freely, from traversing the Vortex with the natural ease it was meant to.

“Thank you,” Romana whispers, quiet enough that even Narvin won’t hear.

_Narvin._

Now that they’re out of the disturbance and Romana can manage to pick her thoughts and her limbs back into some semblance of normalcy, her attention turns fully to her friend, who is looking even worse for the wear in the brighter light. He’s still slumped, still taking deep, heaving breaths like even that is a struggle. Between the TARDIS using him as its primary psychic link and the natural misery of the time storm, it’s no surprise, but it still hurts to see him in such evident pain.

“Narvin.” Romana rests her hands on his wrists. It was one thing clinging together desperately in the unreality of the time storm, but under the regular bright lights of this room, she’s hesitant to touch him even this gently. He lets out a strangled groan and tries to stand properly. She braces her hands against his arms, preventing him from toppling forward as best she can while still keeping a reasonable distance between them.

“You need to lie down,” she says. “Can you — can you walk?”

He nods, but there isn’t any confidence in his eyes. She keeps a grip on his forearm just in case.

They stagger slowly to the office, which to Romana’s surprise is closer to the console room than she remembers. She pauses outside the door, fingers just touching the knob, and sends another flash of gratitude out, hoping the TARDIS can still understand her.

Narvin collapses the instant they reach the sofa, hitting the cushions so hard she’s afraid he might have bruised something. He’s still mostly sitting up, but his shoulders tip to one side, eyes closing automatically as his head collides with a pillow. Romana drops his arm and breathes out as her own exhaustion hits her all at once — the same exhaustion that’s chased her for weeks, the same exhaustion that left her falling asleep under the console not so long ago. Only it’s multiplied exponentially after crashing through one of the worst possible places in the universe for a time sensitive to be. 

Suddenly dizzy, Romana catches herself on the arm of the sofa, her nails digging into the fabric, into her palm. But the sharp sensation isn’t enough to jolt her, and she sinks almost by accident onto the other side of the sofa. Beside her, Narvin’s breath has faded into sleep, but she needs to stay awake, she needs to make sure he’s still breathing, she needs —

* * *

When Narvin wakes, it’s a slow surfacing out of the deepest sleep he’s managed since his exile from Gallifrey. He’s disoriented at first, which isn’t something that usually happens — he prides himself on his ability to sleep light, to be ready for anything coming at him in the night. The fading threads of a dream blur and tangle in his memory — is it even a dream he’s remembering, or is in the inside-out world of the time storm reverberating inside his skull?

A low humming surrounds him, and his neck is aching from the unfortunate angle it was resting in, and Romana’s head has fallen against his chest.

Narvin’s instinct is to jolt in surprise, but he stifles it at the sound of her even breathing. He doesn’t want to startle her, too. She needs the rest just as much as he did. In fact, they apparently both needed the rest so much that they paid very little attention to the position they were falling asleep in, or he wouldn’t be leaning backwards against the arm of the sofa, his legs twisted sideways to rest on the floor, with Romana slumped over so she’s practically on top of him, one of her legs stretched out on the sofa and the other trailing off the edge.

He makes an effort to control his breathing, to stifle a swallow. Romana may have hugged him in the console room, but surely she didn’t _mean_ to fall asleep on him like this. 

It’s been so long since she’s fallen asleep on him like this. 

But their exile seems to be eroding the barriers they re-built early in the War, one by one — from the unprecedented ease with which they reach for each other’s hands, to the way they rarely try to keep up a vein of professionalism anymore, not when they’re trading sleep shifts and reminding each other to eat, to their desperate embrace in the middle of the time storm —

To quietly timing his breath so it rises and falls with her own, and resisting the urge to wrap his free arm around her waist. The longer he waits, the more he notices her tear tracks, the more he becomes aware of the sensation of her mouth half-pressed to his chest, the more he remembers the panic in her voice as he struggled to push back against the time storm and its sickness, the more he wants to brush aside her hair where it falls in her eyes. His hearts flutter in his chest, an old, familiar sensation.

Even with the sleep he got, Narvin’s body is still awash in more exhaustion that he’s ever felt in his life. Even if he _could_ slip away without dislodging Romana, he doesn’t think he could muster up the energy to try. But if moving is out of the question, the least he can do is try to shift into a more comfortable position, one where his legs aren’t dangling sideways onto the floor. Inhaling slowly, Narvin stretches his legs out on the sofa, jostling Romana’s only slightly as he wriggles underneath her. For a moment, he’s afraid he’s startled her awake, but she only sighs against him.

Her weight on top of him gradually becomes rather relaxing, and it isn’t long before he’s dozing off again, slipping into a gray and dreamless slumber.

When Narvin next wakes it isn’t a gentle resurfacing at all — it’s a sudden jolt as a low humming reverberates through their room. Romana wakes too, but she muffles a groan into his chest and flops an arm before, several moments later, she seems to realize where she is.

“Narvin.” She sits upright. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to — "

“Oh! Ah, you’re — it’s fine. You’re fine.” When his eyes meet hers, the look on her face is surprisingly lost, surprisingly fragile, and he takes her hand automatically, squeezing it gently until she’s biting back something that might on a good day be a smile.

The shadow in her eyes clears and suddenly her eyebrows bunch together.

“What on Gallifrey is that _noise_?”

Narvin makes a noise that possibly could be categorized as a groan of despair. “No. No, we can’t have _one_ peaceful moment on this ship, can we.”

Romana looks away. “It isn’t the ship’s fault.”

“This _ship_ was deliberately using the time winds to make our lives difficult.”

“This _ship_ was also deliberately gutted by Mantus.” Her hands twist in her lap. “Couldn’t you feel it? I thought it was your mind that it was connecting through — showing us how trapped it felt. It was so — so _angry_. So alone.”

“I could feel it hurting, but — I don’t know.”

“It backed off when I asked it to,” Romana murmurs. “Did you feel that too?”

Narvin shakes his head. “I don’t think our minds were linked enough for me to sense the all of the communication between you and the TARDIS. I just felt — " A memory of that head splitting pain crashes over him, laced with the grief of watching the shade of Leela just out of reach. 

“I just felt the pain,” he finishes hoarsely.

He can picture the way Romana’s biting her lower lip without even having to look, and when she touches his shoulder briefly, it’s not unexpected.

“You’re right though,” she says. “We should find out what’s wrong.”

They make their way back to the console room, returned to its normal barely-holding-together state. But as they step closer to the controls, the low humming fades.

“Did you — “ Romana’s brow furrows.

“I know. I don’t know if that means everything’s fine, or something worse is coming.”

“Let’s take a look.” She spins the navigation screen so they can both peer at it, and to Narvin’s surprise, the way forward looks clear. They must have fully passed through the last waves of the temporal disturbance while he and Romana were sleeping. He spares a moment for a flash of fear at what might have been if disaster had struck while they were napping, but if he’s honest, neither of them could have functionally handled the controls after their ordeal in the time storm.

More than that — Leela’s biodata trail has an _endpoint_. They’re no longer just calling up the next readable data point in chronological order, no longer triangulating or confirming with locals that she really was where the machine said she was, and Mantus didn’t corrupt the data to send them spinning off on a wild goose chase. Based on every available metric they have, Leela is there, on that world spinning around a dying star on the view screen.

Romana’s eyes meet his, and he can see the same shocked hope in her eyes — after all they’ve been through — an exile, countless dangerous worlds, nearly being torn apart just today — they’re almost at the end of their journey.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during Unity (during the night they spend on the ranch).

Outside the sunset is fading into darkness. Veega’s long vanished in the house, presumably to rest, given she was looking more unwell by the minute. Narvin hovers at the back door for a long moment after Leela dismisses them before slipping inside and leaving Leela to her watch.

He finds Rayo pacing in the kitchen, unsettled. He stops when Narvin enters.

“We have a spare room.” Rayo’s voice is a mixture of wary and curious, which is only to be expected, given that this house doesn’t have many visitors. Narvin tries to ignore the fact that he and Romana are complete strangers to this boy, that Leela never so much as uttered their names to him — but he can’t help how much it stings. “It’s been mostly old storage for a while now, things we didn’t want to throw out but didn’t really want to keep. Room’s a bit dusty, but there’s an old bed in there. And the other one of you could take the sofa, if you like.”

“Thank you.” Narvin tries not to awkwardly shuffle in place. “For your hospitality. We, ah, we appreciate it. And no need to worry about not having enough places to sleep — Time Lords don’t need as much sleep as humans, we can take turns.”

“Suit yourselves.” Rayo shrugs. “Romana went back to the room already, if you’re looking for her. Third door on the right in the back hall.”

“Yes. Thank you,” he says again, and Rayo nods. Narvin sets out down the hall, counting doors and pushing open the partially ajar one to the spare room.

It _is_ cluttered, a mix of household items and outdoor equipment — old wire mesh and a cracked water spigot and a handful of loose doorknobs, the list goes on. It looks mostly organized though; everything is stacked relatively neatly on the floor or on a set of shelves on the wall. There isn’t much furniture in the room except a small set of dresser drawers and a comfortable-size bed in the corner. When he enters, Romana’s perched on the corner of it, one hand wrapped around the post at the foot of the bed.

Narvin leans against the doorframe. “Rayo said it was dusty in here.”

“A bit.” She isn’t looking at him. “Not bad though. I thought the sofa might be nicer, but if you’d rather take this room instead of me — "

“Romana. I’m not really expecting to get any sleep tonight.”

She lets out a long sigh and tips her head so it rests against the bedpost. “No.”

Narvin shuts the door and crosses the room to sit beside her. She’s right — there’s some dust and a general sense of disuse around this place, but it isn’t neglected. 

Something about this is familiar — waiting in a farmhouse for morning, uncertain about where their journey will go next — but so much has changed since Njagilheim. There they at least had a goal, an end destination, however unlikely it seemed that they would reach it. Finding Leela was supposed to make things _better_ , but now?

The sharpness in Leela’s eyes, the distrust, it’s wormed into Narvin’s chest and curled up there, something cold and heavy that he doesn’t know how to shake. Logically, with all the temporal disturbances in the universe, arriving so many years after Leela on Unity shouldn’t be a shock. But truly, he hadn’t expected her to have moved on with her life as much as she has. The memory of the last time he saw her is still fresh — how she kissed his cheek, insisted she would be fine, promised to find him once she got back from her mission. He’s dreamt of it too often, imagined what could have been if she’s changed her mind, or if Romana had, or if something else had happened to prevent the mission with the Master from going ahead. But that moment was so long ago for her, he wonders how long it’s been since she thought of it.

He wonders how long it’s been since Leela missed him.

Romana is radiating tension — she’s pressed so tightly against the edge of the bed, like she’s trying to put as much distance between them as possible. 

“We have to get the TARDIS back,” she says, sudden and quiet.

“I know.”

“Even if Leela won’t help us. It’s our only means of getting out of here, and when the War comes here, I don’t want to be sitting ducks.”

Narvin fiddles with a loose thread in the blanket. “Do you think Veega was right to be worried about the Time Lords following us here?”

Romana’s silent for a long moment.

“I don’t know,” she admits finally. “We did everything we could to make sure we weren’t being traced, but the IDU had more means at their disposal than we knew of. I would hope that Mantus and Rassilon would have better things to do than sabotage a pair of exiles even more than they already have, and I would certainly hope that crossing the temporal disturbance would throw them off our trail if they were ever on it, but I suppose there’s never a complete guarantee.”

It’s exactly the answer he would have given, if she had asked him the same question.

“The city’s dangerous, Leela said.”

“We’ve faced plenty of dangerous things in our lives.”

He’s starting to tug the thread out of the blanket at this point. “It would help, you know, if you ever learned how to properly shoot a weapon.”

“I know how to shoot a weapon. I just prefer to use…other methods.”

Narvin snorts. “You might know _how_ to shoot a staser, but your ability to hit a target is….sporadic, if I’m being generous.”

“Oh, that was generous?” 

“I did supervise your basic CIA training.”

“I’m well aware,” she mutters, but there’s a ghost of a smile on her face. It sends a wave of relief crashing through him, relief that vanishes in the next moment when her expression turns distant again.

“Still,” Romana says. “There must be a way to do this on our own. I don’t want to be stuck on Unity without a way out, and I don’t want Time Lord technology just lying around in this city, and I — " She hesitates.

“And you would feel bad for abandoning the TARDIS, after everything it’s been through?” he offers, softly.

She looks away. “It’s silly, I suppose. It’s just another time ship.”

 _It isn’t just another time ship_ , he wants to say. _It’s ours, it’s the closest thing we have to a home anymore_ — but he doesn’t have a right to claim that title. They aren’t bound to the ship; they’re just crashing around the universe in it. Still, he remembers the raw anguish that reverberated through his mind during the storm, and if that ship gets poked and prodded at again, he can only imagine the consequences.

“You’re right,” Narvin says, finally. “We do need to go after it, no matter what. But do you really think that Leela won’t help us at all?”

“I hope not,” Romana sighs, and if she was trying to shrink before that’s nothing like what she’s doing now, shoulders hunched, eyes pointed to the far corner of the room. “I would understand if she never wanted to trust _me_ again, but you?”

“What do you mean?”

Romana turns to stare at him, bewildered. “Narvin, everything that’s happened to her in the War, every miserable experience she’s had since leaving Gallifrey, all of it is my fault. She is well within her rights to blame me, but she can’t _possibly_ stay angry at you.” She’s blinking too hard now, and when she looks away again her shoulders rise and fall in a shaky exhale. “All you did was try to protect her.”

The shock of Romana’s words settles over him, but it’s not unpleasant. What she’s saying — it’s the closest thing to an apology she’s given him, for disregarding his concerns about involving the Master on a mission and putting Leela at risk.

And yet there’s an undercurrent of despair to her words that chills him. Narvin reaches out without thinking to rest a hand on her arm, but Romana flinches, and he stops.

“I didn’t mean — "

Romana shakes her head with a tired laugh. “I’m not the one who deserves any comforting, Narvin.”

The words stick in his throat — he knows the emotions he wants to name, can feel them contorting in his stomach. 

“You should never have ordered that mission,” Narvin says, because ignoring that would make everything he says next seem disingenuous. “But I don’t — "

“Yes, you _do_ , Narvin. _Yes_ , you blame me, of _course_ you blame me.” Romana digs her hands into the blanket. “You’ve done a good job at pretending, too good a job at times, but _please_ don’t bother pretending now. It’s too late for that. We’re never finding her, not the Leela who left Gallifrey, and I would understand if you — " Her voice is low, choked. “You have followed me further than I ever deserved, you have given up more than you _ever_ should have. And I failed to save Gallifrey, and I failed to find Leela in time, and I’m _sorry_.”

The raw grief in her voice, the forcefulness of her words — it’s enough to shock him into silence. As he scrambles to process her outburst, the tension in the air, her shrinking and flinching away from him, all falls into place.

“I don’t blame you,” Narvin says finally. “Not like you think I do. I wish you’d listened to me, I always wish you’d _listen_ more. But there is no universe in which you would ever have wanted things to turn out the way they did.”

“That doesn’t excuse anything.” Romana swipes at her eyes.

“I could never have stayed angry with you,” he says quietly. “You authorized Leela’s mission, yes, but the mission would never have existed were it not for this war. And this war might not have existed were it not for _my_ mistakes, and so if you think I blame you, if you think that this is all your fault and yours alone — Romana, there is more than enough blame to go around.”

He closes his eyes. “You forgave me, when you learned what I’d done. You said that you knew I never wanted this war to happen, and I couldn’t keep punishing myself for it. Do you _really_ not understand how I could forgive you?”

When he opens his eyes, Romana looks as shocked as he felt when she apologized.

“I didn’t — " She clears her throat. “I never — "

“Thought of it like that?”

“It’s different. You don’t _know_ what would have happened without your interference.” She crosses her arms, pressing them to her stomach.

Narvin shakes his head. “The point is, that you would give almost anything to change it if you could, and I know very much how that feels. Probably more than most people in the universe.”

He extends a hand again, hesitant, but this time, Romana takes it. He’s close enough to see how quickly she’s blinking, how much she’s struggling not to cry.

“It’s not just Leela,” she whispers. “It’s _everything_. You should be back on Gallifrey, not _stuck_ here on this world we don’t know. When you refused to help me, I thought, maybe it was a blessing. I was the only one who would pay if it went wrong, I _should_ have been the only one who paid the price, and you should be _safe_ and…”

He stares at her.

“Do you really think I’d want to be stuck there under Rassilon’s rule? Without anyone I could trust?”

“You could have still done some good there. Maybe you could even have found Leela earlier in her timeline.”

Narvin makes a frustrated noise. “Yes, I wanted to keep fighting from within. _Yes_ , I wanted to keep our place on Gallifrey, I wanted to protect our world and the universe for as long as we could. But I _never_ wanted to do it alone.”

_I never wanted to do it without you._

“They offered you your _lives_ , Narvin. I never meant for you to give up so much.”

“It’s been a long time since I lost my regenerations. I knew how much life I had left, and there are more important things than trying to — extend that. I wasn’t going to sell out to Rassilon for… empty time. I thought you understood that.”

Narvin’s isn’t sure which of them moved, but they’re now sitting shoulder to shoulder, as his thumb brushes along the back of her hand.

“Forgive me for wanting you to be safe,” Romana murmurs.

“There isn’t anywhere left in the universe that’s safe. It was beyond past time that I stopped wishing for somewhere that was.”

They sit side-by-side for a long moment, not saying anything at all.

There are so many never-moments, could-have-beens that are always crowded at the edge of a Time Lord’s senses. Narvin doesn’t want to look too close and risk glimpsing a universe where they had a quiet ending. A universe, perhaps, where he eventually chose the life he was building with Romana and Leela outside of the CIA over the work that had given him purpose his entire life. As much as that possibility feels surreal, it isn’t for lack of wanting. His loyalties and life priorities have tipped and churned since he first met both of them, and he may have been most satisfied after a job well done at the Agency, but he was always happiest when he was alongside the two of them. His relationship with Leela was the first thing in his life that had no logic at all behind him, no obligation or duty, nothing but a genuine want to share his life with this other person. And it was always harder, with Romana, to strike that balance when he did have obligations to her in the office, when shared duty was the origin point of their personal relationship. But it was worth it, every day, every moment.

The light from the window continues to fade as the sky outside shifts to blackness. Narvin considers looking for a light in this room, but that would mean stepping away from Romana, and he wants to hold onto this moment — the peace of her pressed against him, the reality that neither of them are waiting for morning alone.

* * *

Romana startles out of a hollow dream, stumbling alone in the darkness, and it’s only then that she realizes she accidentally dozed off. Falling asleep on Narvin is getting to be a bad habit again, although can she really call it bad when the days that ended with them and Leela falling asleep in a tangle were some of the happier ones of her life?

Happiness. The concept is a faint echo now, and she struggles to remember if it was worth it. If it was worth _this_ — Leela’s open distrust and rejection of everything that had bound the three of them together.

Narvin shifts slightly in response to her movement. He wasn’t asleep, she doesn’t think, and something in between affection and guilt flutters inside her, that once again he didn’t move, didn’t jostle her from her rest. Once again he let her cling to him even though she’s the one most at fault for everything they’re living through right now, and by rights, he shouldn’t want to be anywhere near her. 

She isn’t unused to undeserved forgiveness; the power of her various offices have generally made people more inclined to let grievances go in the name of political alliances or productive outcomes. Narvin’s forgiveness specifically is something she has taken for granted too often in the past — most notably, when she assumed he’d quickly get past her stepping into the Agency that he had dedicated his life to. (Although come to think of it, she was never certain he’d actually forgiven her for that, only made the best of the situation he found himself in.) But regardless, there had to be a line. There had to be a loss too big to ignore. There had to be a day that he would leave her.

There were a few moments she thought were _it_ — when they lost contact with Leela, when he rejected her plan to assassinate Rassilon, and most notably, today, when Leela greeted them by firing at them and only begrudgingly welcomed them into her home. If they have lost Gallifrey and they have lost Leela, then what is holding up his loyalty to her? What is preventing him from rejecting her, too?

Suddenly choked, Romana hides her face against Narvin’s shoulder, blinking hard. Her fingers tighten on the fabric of her trousers as she struggles for a breath that doesn’t sound shaky.

She’s still too aware of his hand on her waist, but not in an unpleasant way, not at all. Romana tends to dislike being touched by most people in the universe. It’s an uncomfortable intrusion at best, and an active effort to harm her at worse. But for the few exceptions, quite the opposite is true. It was a switch that flipped quickly for Leela — it wasn’t long into their friendship and the novelty of Leela’s unexpected, casual touches that Romana found herself quietly craving them. With Narvin, it was far from immediate, but she still vividly remembers the first time he gripped her forearm and she realized she didn’t mind at all — when she hovered over him in half a panic after he was injured by Lord Prydon on the vampire world. And since then, the comfort has only grown, until one day without her noticing it had transformed into that same quiet craving she had felt with Leela for so long. The same warmth, when she’s pressed up against him. The same fluttering in her hearts when, now, his hand resumes brushing gentle circles against her hip, and his nose tips sideways to press against the top of her hair.

Romana lifts her head. “About what I was saying earlier.”

“The part where you’re insisting you’re unforgivable?”

“The part where you’ve suffered too much standing by me, and yet you’re still here.” Romana’s touching his arm, as if to illustrate her point. “And I — even though I wish — " She’s struggling with her words, but Narvin is quiet, waiting for her to finish. “I know I don’t say it enough, so. Thank you.”

Narvin doesn’t move, and then he lets out a breath that’s part-laugh and part-sigh of relief.

“Of course.”

“No.” She shakes her head. “Not _of course_. There are so many people in the universe who would never do what you’ve done, who would never follow anyone this far, not with everything you’ve lost."

“Romana.” Her name is practically a groan. “I’m not here because of some — sense of duty. It’s been so long since it was ever just that, you _know_ that. You have to know that.”

“I’m not sure I can believe that it’s so easy to tell the difference.” Her mouth twists in a self-deprecating smile. “Even now.”

Narvin’s hand on her waist tightens suddenly.

“I know myself,” he says quietly. “I know my loyalties. I know what’s important to me, and I know why. You are a brilliant leader, but that’s because you always genuinely wanted what was best for Gallifrey and the universe. You are compassionate and brave, and you’ve made mistakes, but so have I, and it doesn’t — “ Narvin’s voice drops to a whisper, and Romana’s hand has slid from his arm to his shoulder, and how did they end up this close?

“I know how much, or how little, time I have left,” he says hoarsely. “And even if we never see Gallifrey again, even if Leela won’t leave here, that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve chosen to spend that time with you.”

Romana doesn’t speak. She _can’t_ speak, can’t say anything at all because the sincerity in his voice is too much for her to bear. 

_Chosen._ Does he know, did Leela ever tell him, what the weight of that word means to her? _Especially_ coming from him, who for so long always had a professional obligation to follow her even if he disagreed. Narvin has made plenty of his own choices — to stand by her in the civil war, to serve as her Chancellor, to make his peace with her after she took over the CIA, to take her hand on the hill above a marketplace and begin something new — but they have always been colored by the weight of her authority. She was his President, his superior officer, so much more than she ever was to Leela. And even leaving Gallifrey behind — the weight of that history echoes. He follows her. That has always been how it is. 

But here on a dusty planet in the far corners of the galaxy, neither of them know where they’re going anymore. 

There isn’t anything between them anymore — not their titles, not their duty to Gallifrey, not even Leela. There isn’t anything at all to push them together. There isn’t anything at all to keep them apart.

_I’ve chosen to spend that time with you._

The silence stretches out, too long. Narvin starts to look away.

She kisses him. 

It’s soft and quick, and when Romana pulls away, Narvin is frozen, expression unreadable in the dark. She swallows, and words are trying to climb up out of her throat — explanation or excuse or apology, she isn’t sure yet, and then his hand is in her hair and he’s kissing her back and she forgets entirely what she meant to say. 

It has been so _long_ since they’ve done this. She’s missed him so _much_.

And this kiss doesn’t feel like desperation. It doesn’t feel like an attempt to assuage their grief over today’s fraught reunion — if Leela truly does reject them, permanently, it will still break her hearts, and Narvin will share that pain, and nothing between the two of them could change that.

She’s kissing him because she wants to. Because she’s held Narvin at arm’s length for too long in this War, the weight of too much history between them. Because she doesn’t _want_ to keep that distance anymore — what would be the _point_?

Her skin tingles as his fingers trail up to brush the back of her neck. Time dissolves around them, and she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him — slowly, lips brushing, and then with more urgency as he presses against her and makes a noise in the back of his throat that sends her hearts racing all over again. 

Eventually, she breaks for breath, and the galloping of her hearts is so much that she can’t do anything but fall forward, so her forehead rests against his. His breath is just as erratic as hers.

Neither of them say anything. Any more words here, in the darkness, would somehow break the illusion, shake apart this quiet cocoon they’re living in. Instead, they rest there for a while, foreheads just touching, before Narvin pulls Romana’s head to his shoulder, and they collapse back onto the bed, holding each other.

Romana stays awake for a long time, that night. But wrapped up with Narvin, _choosing_ to stay wrapped up with him, knowing that he _does_ want her there, despite everything — it is far from the worst restless night she’s had in this war.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place during their final day on Unity and includes dialogue from the Unity audio. Content warnings: side character death, suicidal thoughts, attempted suicide.

Narvin didn’t expect to sleep that night. Too many feelings coiling and twisting around them both, pressing in so tightly he can barely breathe, dizzy with the rush of it all.

He wakes — well, _wakes_ may be too strong a word. He slips back into consciousness after his latest doze, sense and sensation slotting back in all at once. The red light of the sunrise burning in through a corner window. The scratch of the blanket around at his forearms. The quiet thud of footsteps in the other room, shifting as the morning comes.

Romana, her head still tucked against his chest, her blonde hair a cascade that catches the light when he opens his eyes. It’s a familiar weight. 

He closes his eyes and breathes, and she mirrors his inhale, the rise and fall — she’s awake too, or at least no longer dozing — and this is _right_.

If he doesn’t move, if they just stay right here, maybe the day won’t have to come. Maybe they won’t have to worry about being stranded on this cruel world without a TARDIS, worry about Leela and _how long has it been_ and _how will they ever fix this?_

“You’re thinking too loudly,” Romana whispers against Narvin’s shoulder, and he jolts. 

“Were you listening?”

“No.” She props herself up, one hand planted on either side of his chest, and half-smiles down at him. “You would have known. But it’s audible.” 

“It’s morning.”

“I can see that,” she says, still gazing down at him, still not moving. He wishes he could categorize the expression on her face, the fractures of a hundred emotions hidden just under her eyes. 

Narvin reaches up and finds her hand on his shoulder, slides their fingers together without looking. Romana makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a sigh and looks away. She squeezes his hand once and slides off the bed.

“Leela must have made her decision by now.” She’s brisk, smoothing down the wrinkles in her shirt, tugging down the corners of her sleeves. Feeling oddly weightless, Narvin pushes himself up and reaches for one of his boots. 

“We can ask her — ”

“I’ll go.” Romana flashes him a quick, apologetic look. “Best not to give the appearance of, oh what’s the word? Ganging up on her?”

Narvin raises his eyebrows before returning to fastening his boots.

“And besides, you’re probably more likely to succeed on a second try than I am.” Romana zips her boots and runs a hand loosely through her hair, as if to sort out the knots.

“If she’s already decided not to help us, and _you_ can’t persuade her, you really think I would do a better job at changing her mind?”

She stands, one hand drumming on her knee, her eyes distant and unreadable. “Yes.”

The memories of their conversation last night wash over him, and a lump fills his throat. He has watched Romana and Leela survive so much — loss and betrayal, the fractures of war and time that have snapped at them, tried to break them. He has watched them rebuild bridges, re-learn the process of forgiveness, time and again. The sadness in Romana’s voice — it is the same feeling as when time is out of place around him, the sense of pieces dislodged from where they belong. This is _wrong_.

“Romana — ”

“But hopefully it won’t come to that.” She leans back down, closes the last clasp on her boots. “Wish me luck?”

Narvin isn’t sure if she means it as a question, or if she even expects an answer. But he stands anyways and catches her hand in his. “Good luck.”

Romana leans sideways, her elbow nudging his. Then she drops his hand and leaves the room, leaves him waiting with that same tangled knot in his chest, with the same flickering thought of _how_ and _what if_ and _what next_.

* * *

Romana has vastly overestimated her ability to compartmentalize when it comes to Leela.

They have a TARDIS to track down in a dangerous city. She can’t afford to lose control of her emotions, to let herself get swept away in the twisting cloud of pain and euphoria at having Leela back by her side, and yet still so distant. 

Leela’s shoulder bumps against hers as the hovercar lurches, and the sudden jolt is probably excuse enough for Romana’s involuntary gasp. But truthfully, every time Leela accidentally touches her, it’s as if live wires underneath her skin are sparking back to life. 

Shouldn’t she be over this kind of dizzying, fluttering feeling? How is it that every time she glances at Leela she has to resist the urge to hug her tight enough that both of them can barely breathe and beg her to come back?

Romana isn’t entirely sure why Leela decided that she was to come into the city, while Narvin stayed behind. But it probably isn’t complimentary that Narvin is the one she trusts to watch over Veega and Rayo and the ranch, while Romana is the one Leela wants to keep an eye on. 

That itching suspicion is only confirmed by the cold fire in Leela’s eyes when Romana admits the secret she promised Veega she would keep. (She tells herself that Veega wouldn’t want Leela to risk herself on a mission that has no chance of success. She tries to convince herself that’s true, that it isn’t just an excuse.)

“You are lying.” Leela doesn’t miss a beat, and the raw certainty in her voice is almost more than Romana can bear. _She doesn’t trust us_ , Romana had told Narvin, and yet deep down, she wanted to believe she was wrong, that Leela’s suspicion was simply a gut reaction after living in this war for so long, and it would fade as soon as she remembered that she — that she — 

“Why _would_ I?”

“Because you think I am wasting our time. Because you only care about finding the TARDIS.”

“That isn’t fair.” Romana digs her fingernails into her palms and tries to keep her voice from cracking. Leela’s eyes are sharp and weary at the same time, but there is no warmth in them. It has been a long time since Romana has been on the receiving end of that particular look, the kind of resigned coolness Leela reserved for those on Gallifrey who she thought were politicians without honor. The last time Leela looked at her like that, it was on another version of Gallifrey, when Leela appraised her with all the distance of a political rival. 

Romana spent so long on that world not reaching out, trusting that if Leela wanted to come back, she would find her own way — only to learn that she needed to be the one to take the risk, take the first step back towards Leela. But here and now, every time Romana says how much they need her, missed her, want her, it’s only met with a greater rebuff. 

“I know you, Romana. It has been a long time, but I _know_ you.” The sharp weariness is in Leela’s voice now, every word cold. 

This is who Romana is to Leela, with the perspective of distance and time. Selfish. A liar. Unworthy, in every way.

( _You said once that if you were facing the end, you would rather it be by my side. You said that you loved me, you said it was a promise, and I — I believed you. Why did I believe you?_ )

“I’m telling you the truth!” Romana says, and it sounds like what it is — one last desperate plea. 

“Then why are you only telling me this now?”

“I didn’t, I — ” As she stumbles over excuses, as she finally admits to the unkind truth that she wanted to guarantee Leela’s help, by any means, as Leela’s eyes flicker with that resignation, the ground is increasingly unsteady under Romana’s feet. If Leela refuses to help her now, how is she supposed to find the TARDIS on her own? If Leela insists on rejecting the one chance of escape they have, how is Romana supposed to keep Narvin safe? 

“You have to believe me.” She has no other cards to play, no hope but that somewhere deep down Leela still holds a glimmer of fondness towards her, a flicker of faith in her. Because now Romana can see, finally, that it doesn’t matter how warm those recent memories of her own are. It doesn’t matter that Leela once held her through a hundred nightmares and whispered things to her in the dark more gentle than her hearts thought they could bear. It doesn’t matter, what once existed between them. Not to Leela. Not anymore. 

“If I find out that you are lying — ”

“Leela. I know how long it’s been, but I am _still_ your friend.” _I understand that is all I will ever be, if you will even grant me that._ “We traveled across countless light years and centuries to find you — I wouldn’t lie! And certainly not about a thing like this.” _I know what Veega means to you. I’m sorry for dismissing it. I didn’t want to accept how much you had moved on, but I understand. I know how much losing her will hurt you._

“Then I believe you,” Leela says at last, and Romana exhales. 

There’s a thrill to breaking into the room where they’re keeping the TARDIS beside Leela. Even if Romana can’t suppress a slight discomfort in her gut at the brutal efficiency of some of Leela’s methods — even if she’s watching Leela too closely, cataloging all the ways she’s changed and the moments where she’s so clearly the same woman Romana has loved all these years.

It hasn’t been nearly that long for Romana — how could she forget how quickly Leela moves when she attacks, the way her body twists and her hands flash, the way her eyes burn as she stares down at an enemy crumpled at her feet? She is so vibrant and fierce and _alive_ and Romana finds herself tripping over her words, blushing against her will and hoping that Leela doesn’t notice. 

They find the TARDIS, and it should be a victory.

“It is a long time since I saw a TARDIS up close.” Leela runs a finger along the outer shell. Since it hasn’t dematerialized since, it’s still in the shape it configured itself as when they landed at the ranch — an old outhouse. The appearance of a flimsy wood exterior, and all that technology inside. 

“Yes, I suppose it would be.” Romana moves to slip inside.

“When you arrived, and I saw this one across the plain, my heart sank.”

Romana freezes. Her fingers curl against the door handle, and she doesn’t dare look back at Leela. “Really?”

“I knew it was you. And I knew why you were here. I _knew_ you would come looking for me.”

 _Because you thought we wanted something from you, or because you thought we missed you?_ she doesn’t ask. Leela has made it clear that she still doesn’t trust their intentions in landing here.

“Is that why you shot at us?” Romana snaps back, unable to keep the hurt out of her voice.

Leela half-laughs. “If I had intended to hit you, you would not be here.” She inhales, and Romana knows with utter certainty that she does not want to hear whatever Leela has to say next. “I thought, perhaps, I might still keep you away. For both our sakes.”

There’s a sudden noise, someone coming, and they rush inside the TARDIS before Romana has the time to catalog all the ways her hearts have shattered. 

Romana throws herself into untangling the mess of tampered controls because if she thinks too long about the heavy weight that has lodged itself in her chest, she will freeze again. And she has to keep moving, she _has_ to get Leela back home.

And, naturally, as she has barely begun, the voice of a Dalek echoes through the room, reverberating, muffled, around the console. 

_Mining. Of course_. Romana should have seen it sooner, should have expected that the Daleks would have interest in the mines here, should have predicted that they would be extracting all the human and mineral resources they can from this place. 

Her hands don’t shake. They don’t. 

The Daleks are here. Taking fuel to power their armies, threatening all of time and space from this point. Unstoppable, as they have always been, and she can’t _think_ , and she is decades younger and terrified and certain beyond anything that one day soon they’ll decide she’s disposable, and there is no escape, and she will die on that awful rock —

Leela’s voice slices through the fog — the coordinates, the ranch, Veega and Rayo —

Yes. _Yes._ She can do this, she _has_ to get Leela back to her family. Save them all. 

Romana has watched too many people die in the war, too many allies, too many innocents, both from her perch on Gallifrey looking out over the carnage, and careening through this universe, unable to save even _one person_ again and again and again —

Her hands are flying over the console, urging the ship onward, and she can feel the nudge of its presence in the back of her mind. Something like fear, of crumbling apart, of getting turned inside out again.

 _I need you to do this. I’m sorry, but you have to. We both_ have _to_.

Romana has done everything she can in the limited moments she’s had. Reprogrammed where she could, ripped out excess wires and attachments. The ship heaves around them, stuttering through the Vortex, and Leela is panicked, insistent, why aren’t they _back yet_ and Romana has to do this, she has to do this _one thing_ right, she has to get them back in time.

When the TARDIS lands at last, Romana leans over the console, breathing heavily as Leela bursts out the doors, drawing the blaster at her side. The brush of the TARDIS consciousness still lingers against her mind, a faint dizziness and unsteadiness in her timesense. Romana rises to follow Leela out the door and nearly trips over a box of the old weaponry Narvin collected weeks ago from the TARDIS bay in the battleship — old weapons components he hasn’t yet used, staser power packs, the chameleon circuit. Romana peers tentatively out the door and, once she’s satisfied that Leela has the situation with the raiders well under control, slips inside to find Narvin and Veega and Rayo. They won’t have long to leave this world before the Daleks storm the ranch. 

“The Daleks are following us.” The words are halfway out of her mouth when Narvin turns, and she knows instantly that something is wrong. “Leela’s taking care of the raiders. What — ?”

Narvin swallows. “It’s Veega.”

“What about her?”

“She’s — ” 

No. 

“ — she’s gone.” 

_No._

Romana can feel the pressure of the air molecules around her, the curve of the ground beneath her feet. And yet it is all hollow, distant, a slow-motion shifting around her as her breath turns sharp, a great scraping, clawing sensation bubbling its way up through her chest and threatening to tear out her lungs. She closes her eyes. 

Leela is outside, burning away anyone who dares to threaten her family here at the ranch, fierce and unstoppable. Leela is here, on this broken world, and she has endured too much heartache already. Too much heartache at Romana’s hands.

All she had to do was get Leela back in time. One last thing, one last act — and the words, memories shudder and swirl inside her head, like the gusts of winds blowing up the dust until it chokes out everything else. Free Gallifrey from Rassilon’s tyranny. Save Leela from the horrors of the Time War. All of them one last act, one last achievement — she’s clung to them too tightly, as if _one last_ victory will absolve her of every person she failed to save, of watching everything she ever tried to build on Gallifrey fall apart around her. But every time, she only makes it worse, doesn’t she? Narvin, stripped of a chance at regeneration, exiled from the world he dedicated everything to. Leela, stripped of her last moments with Veega, what little safety she had left with Rayo threatened by the very presence of Time Lords on Unity. 

And what now? There are so many more _one lasts_ hammering around inside her — _you know where the Daleks fuel source is, you can stop them_ (but the Time Lords are the only ones who could win that fight, and they would tear this world from history), _you can lead Leela and Rayo and Narvin to somewhere remote, somewhere safe_ (but what good can _she_ do, when all of her choices have only lead to more destruction? How can she possibly ask any of them to trust her?)

She can’t. She _can’t_. 

The thought crystallizes the whirlwind of memory into something ice, something sharp and sure. 

There is no good left that she can do in this universe. There hasn’t been for a long time. 

Romana inhales, and a feeling of release rushes over her. The scrabbling sensation in her chest calms, the claws curling in on themselves in a gentle fist that rests heavy on her hearts. 

It’s time to stop pretending. It’s time to stop.

She remembers — and oh, it’s been so long but she remembers — standing in front of the Oubliette of Eternity as it was dismantled in front of her and thinking of _never was_ , of a world of ghosts and forgotten crimes, of understanding the urge to disappear, unmake, _absolve_. She remembers, stumbling out of the TARDIS moments ago and glimpsing — 

She exhales. 

And then she opens her eyes and Narvin is staring at her, weary and afraid. Something else flares inside her, warm and aching, because when she falls, he has always been there to catch her. 

Her voice feels like it belongs to someone else as she tries to soften the news when Leela bursts in, tries to give what kindness she can ( _one last_ — ). But there isn’t time. They’ve run out. She’s run out.

She’s _almost_ run out. But she has just enough time left to turn to Narvin. Possibly the last person in the universe who actually _wants_ her around. Her friend and partner for so many years, who has only _just_ insisted that he plans to spend his days by her side. If she is going to walk away, he deserves to know why.

And he is a Time Lord carrying the weight of this war just as much, and he is Narvin, with all the stupid, selfless loyalty that implies, and she hopes, believes he will understand. 

“Could I have a word?”

* * *

The longer he listens to Romana speak, the colder the sensation in his chest, the more his hands tremble at his sides. They have crossed galaxies and centuries together to find Leela, to reunite the three of them _at last_ , and she wants to stay behind? The shaking edge to her voice, how her eyes look impossibly lost — he knows what drowning in guilt looks like, because some days it still feels like he’s barely coming up for air. He won’t let her go under.

“It’s my only choice,” she insists, and Narvin shakes his head.

“No. No, that isn’t true. You won’t let the Time Lords hurt this world — ”

“So I’ll let the Daleks destroy it instead?”

“That isn’t what I meant, and you know it. There are other options, Romana, there is — another way forward, or — ” If his voice is increasingly high-pitched, increasingly desperate, he can hardly be blamed, with her looking so tired and so still, silhouetted against the sky.

“This isn’t a debate, Narvin.”

“ _Yes_ , it is. Do you seriously think I would leave you here alone in this place?”

“Leaving here is the only way to get Leela and Rayo to safety. They can’t fly the TARDIS, certainly not _this_ TARDIS. They need you.” She takes a breath, as if to steady herself, and says quieter than ever, “I need you both safe.” 

His hearts stutter in his chest because he knows, and she knows — there is nothing like safety left for any of them. But he remembers, and she remembers — the last time she said those words, held head high in the presidential office. The last time he left her to face the Daleks alone.

Here they stand, in the wreckage of the outcome.

 _If I could change it, I would_ , he told her once, head aching after another stumbling trek through the timelines, trying to twist them back into shape, trying to undo what he created. _If I could make a different choice, I would._

 _This is not the same_ , a part of him is screaming. The TARDIS is so close — he could get Leela’s help and drag Romana on board, he could even materialize it around her and leave this awful planet before she had time to muck with the controls. No one would get hurt. No one would pay the price of saving her.

 _Are you sure?_ another part of him whispers.

“That isn’t fair,” he manages finally, hoarsely. “Romana, I — ” He swallows the words, something thick and wrenching threatening to choke the breath from his lungs. 

Romana swallows, too, and he wonders if she’s choking back the same awful, broken feeling. Her head tips ever so slightly to one side, and the look on her face — there’s a depth to the fragileness in her eyes he’s never seen before.

“I didn’t tell you so you could try to talk me out of it.“

“And why won’t you let me? If you would just _listen_ , if you would _trust me_ — ”

“I _trust_ you.” Romana takes his hand in hers, holds it tight. “I trust you more than anyone in the universe, right now.”

 _More than anyone in the universe_ — she can’t possibly mean that. But the longer he stares back, the more he understands that fragility in her eyes. The vulnerability — she asked him to come out here. She chose to explain herself to him. 

_I trust you_ , she said. 

“You are the only one who could understand. Narvin. _Please._ Leela won’t, she’ll think this is cowardly or foolish, and I — I need your help, to make sure she leaves this place.”

A sliver of memory surfaces, dredged up by the tightening in his chest, the tripping mantra of _there must be a way to convince her, to stop her, to save her from erasing everything._

_“Was there really no way we could have saved her?”_

_“No. Qatal kept her a prisoner to keep her alive. Perhaps it would have been kinder if he hadn’t.”_

_“It’s too late. It was always too late.”_

It is ice in his blood, the realization. This is something he cannot fix — the exhaustion in her shoulders, the too-deep sadness in her eyes. The desire to escape, to let go because her very self has become too much to bear, weighed down by too many sins. Even if he managed to drag her off this world, she could not be free of that. There is no path where this gets better, no alternative where he does not watch her break anyways, in a way that’s far more permanent than erasing her mind. 

It was already too late.

 _This is my only choice_ , she said, and his chest so tight he can barely breathe, Narvin finally sees that it is the best one he has too.

He’s certain Romana can see it — how the rigid tension coiling within him dims and dies, how his hand in hers goes slack.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

Narvin’s arms hang stiffly at his sides as Romana slips back into the TARDIS. The air in his lungs is parched and dry, and it isn’t just the pollen clogging the air. Their ship (and when did it become _their_ ship, the only thing they had in this universe other than each other) is disguised as an old shed, and the door creaks and wobbles as a flash of blonde hair disappears inside.

He has spent his whole life studying time, protecting it, controlling it when need be. And now it’s running through his fingers, sand slipping into cracks, the end of a journey into a beginning into an ending. (No. This can’t be _it_ , after so many decades, so many shared adventures and disasters and late nights and — )

Romana returns with the chameleon circuit draped over one arm, like a particularly strange costume, and it all so terribly real, all at once.

The dryness in his throat congeals into a rough, burning panic as Narvin turns over everything he should say, could say, everything neither of them have time for, with the Daleks capable of turning up at any moment. And it would be so easy to just let it all dry up in his throat. He knows what’s meant to happen next. They will step inside and he will muster the resilience to speak calmly, rationally. They will face Leela and he will do everything in his power to persuade, to lie if necessary. (He will do everything he can to save Leela, because that is still an option, because he will not lose them both on the same day.)

But they have spent so long, too long, holding each other at a distance in this war. If this is really _it_ —

“Romana. I, ah. I don’t know when or — or _if_ we’ll make it back here — ” He tries not to look at her eyes. If he does, he might see that she never intends them to come back for her, and that faint glimmer of hope is the only steady ground under his feet right now. She has always been resourceful. They have always survived far more than is likely. Surely, there must be a timeline where they see each other again. If they’re lucky. 

“It’s alright.” Her voice is gentle, and his hearts flutter in that terrible, wonderful way he has grown so accustomed to.

They don’t have _time_. They don’t have time and there are so many things he should have said last night or all the days they spent on the TARDIS together, or all those years they worked together and lived alongside each other. All those years they spent stepping slowly into each others’ lives, until it felt somehow, impossibly, like they had always belonged together. And this is _it_. 

“I’m sorry.” His voice cracks.

“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t you dare apologize.”

“Romana, this war is — ”

“This isn’t your fault. This has _nothing_ to do with you. This is _my_ choice.” Her shoulders slump. “Narvin, I _can’t_ keep running.”

“I — ”

 _I know_ , Narvin should say, because it’s true. He can’t drag her with him off this world, he can’t save her from the horror that has already swallowed her whole. But the words teeter on his tongue because they aren’t right, they aren’t _enough_ , not when they’re almost out of time.

“I love you,” he says, quiet. 

It is far too tremulous and far too soft, but the weight of it, the truth of it, settles in the air around them. Like an exhale, a breath he’s been holding for too long and is finally letting out. Romana freezes, and he wants to say something to justify or explain or elaborate, but there isn’t time, and there isn’t anything better. There isn’t anything more true. 

They don’t _do_ this. Both of them are so good at leaving things unsaid because it’s easier. They come from a world that taught them to be distant, and it is so hard to shake off the lessons you’ve inhaled all your life. Narvin knows that better than most.

“I know.” Romana looks away. Her voice is shaken, and it sounds like an apology. 

He nods once, quick, and then without warning, she pulls him close, clinging to him just as tightly as she did in the time-twisted TARDIS console. Narvin slides his arms around her waist, his breath shaky and uneven against her hair, and tries not to think that this could be the last time he will ever hold her. 

“And I know I’ve never been very good at it,” Romana whispers, her face hidden against his shoulder. “But I do. Love you, too.”

His arms tighten around her as he tries and fails to say anything at all. 

They stay that way for an all too brief moment, as the weight of it all settles around them. Narvin tries not to think of her, alone and human and memory-wiped, stumbling around on this Dalek-ridden world. He tries not to think of how she agreed when he said _certain death_. The chameleon arch — this at least offers some kind of chance, a hope, a quiet escape, the possibility of a life to return to. 

The slightest chance that she might live — this is the best outcome any of them could possibly hope for.

Romana leans back, fingers still laced in his. She tries to smile. 

He swallows, and he wants to reassure, and he wants to beg her one last time — _then come with me, please_ — and it’s all teetering on the tip of his tongue when Leela bursts through the door, and they really are, finally, out of time. 

Romana jumps, stumbles a few steps backwards. Narvin carefully takes every raw tingling emotion and _shoves_ — Romana needs him, Leela needs him, and everything roiling in his stomach, all the tears choking his throat — he can’t give into them now. He can’t afford to break.

“So, that’s decided. We’re leaving.” 

* * *

The worst part, and the best part, is that Narvin doesn’t blink.

The recognition in his eyes is clear as soon as he steps out onto the porch, and she fumbles for some sort of excuse, but he falls into the act easily. 

By her side until the end. It shouldn’t really surprise her. 

But when he tells her they miss her, her carefully constructed facade of indignation very nearly cracks. She shoves down the choked feeling in her throat and reminds herself that this is exactly why she has to stay. She could never deserve him. She has never deserved either of them, and she won’t let them be hurt any more than they already have because of her.

(Just this one last hurt. Just this one last. It will be over soon.)

The TARDIS engines groan and flare, the time grenades scream in their wake, the Daleks swarm overhead and she remembers — and this one has lingered in her mind for years and years and years, no matter how hard she’s tried to scrub herself clean — the trembling echo of machine scraping along rock, the grating voice against her ears, the whirr of the gun, the wondering — is it today? Is it now?

A Dalek mining world, forcing slaves to extract their fuel. The certainty that she will die there, alone. She tried to claw her way out of there, tried to scrub the traces of that world from her mind, from her very self. 

But there are some places, some fates, you can never truly escape. 

(It will be over soon.)

She is a disgraced former President. She is the CIA Coordinator that failed her world. She doesn’t even have any right to those titles, she doesn’t have a true allegiance left in the universe.

 _I’m sorry. I’m_ sorry.

The Dalek gun raises, and she should be afraid, shouldn’t she? The thing she fears most in all the universe, here to kill her at last.

(It will be over soon.)

A warm breeze rushes past her shoulders. The sun glows down from overhead, fractures of light slipping in between clouds. The landscape rolls out around her, still beautiful in spite of the cloud of dust rushing through the air, in spite of the Daleks scourging this world.

The TARDIS is gone. Narvin and Leela are gone, but they are still alive, still together. Even with all the time that’s passed, she’s watched them grow and change around each other so much over the years. If she has any hope left, it is this: in her absence they can rebuild what was lost. 

If she has any part of herself left to hold onto, here at the end, it is this: she has loved them both for the rest of her lives.

* * *

They are far away from Unity, hovering in some dim corner of space. A temporary stop, so Narvin can try to repair the latest damage to the ship, before they head off in search of a possible refuge.

Great swathes of space divide this TARDIS and Unity; time twists in on itself between them. There is no way for Narvin to know if a Time Lord half a universe away is still breathing.

It feels like he should know. That if she dies, he should feel it — a sudden emptiness, echoing through the Vortex. This weight, the not-knowing, is almost worse, clawing him apart from the inside, screaming at him to _Go back, go back, what have you done?_

He will not see her death. She has left him with an awful, aching unknown, but maybe there’s meant to be a kindness in hope. Maybe it’s meant to be a gift, that in all his memories of her, she’s always so alive. 

Leela vanished into the recesses of the TARDIS corridors not long ago, Rayo close behind. The cold fire of her last glare, the shattered heartbreak in her eyes, is still scorching through him. What is he supposed to do, if Leela doesn’t trust him? How is he supposed to keep dragging himself to his feet, without Romana?

Narvin knows, he knows, he is not the only one grieving, and Romana was not the only one lost today. But a selfish part of him resents that Leela and Rayo have each other, to share their pain over losing Veega. Even though Leela will miss Romana, too — it has been so long for her. She can’t carry the weight of Narvin’s memories — the steel in Romana’s eyes when she stared down Rassilon, how she fought and burned until she couldn’t fight anymore. How she crumpled in on herself, slowly, the longer they spent searching for Leela. How even still, she held him, kissed him, like he meant the world. How exhausted she looked when they said their last goodbyes, when he promised to keep her secret.

Why is it him? It was meant to be the three of them, together, and now they’ve fractured so deeply they will never heal, and why is _he_ the only one carrying the truth? 

Narvin’s hands have been busy ever since he set foot on the TARDIS again because if he stops, if he lets himself remember — 

The navigation circuit is holding. (Don’t think about the panel sparking underneath their hands as they broke out the charred bits of the old circuit.) The gentle hum of the TARDIS is as steady as he’s ever heard it. (Don’t think about clinging together in the console room, the ship wracked with time winds.) 

Narvin keeps moving. He rewires the randomizer they’d built out of component parts (they’d been meaning to get around to it, in case they needed an escape that couldn’t be tracked through the Vortex, but there were higher priorities for repairs). He sweeps for any kind of surveillance equipment or tracking device. He readies their defenses to dematerialize at a moment’s notice if they come under fire.

He steps back into the office to grab a toolbox, and that is his mistake.

The light flickers on, the same as the day before. The sofa pillows are rumpled, from where they collapsed after the time storm. It’s so easy to remember — the weight of Romana’s head on his chest, the matching rise and fall of their breath. The desire to hold her and never let go. 

_Never let go._

Narvin clenches his fists and unclenches them, eyes stinging and he _can’t_ —

He’s sinking onto the sofa before he can think, knees buckled, head dropped into his hands, tears leaking between his fingers, shoulders shaking, and she’s gone she’s gone _she’s gone_.

Everything snaps inside him, all the resentment he tried not to feel ( _How could you just leave me behind? What if I need you?_ ) and the guilt he was always going to crumple under the weight of ( _if this war had never started, if he had never tried to save her, she would still be here_ ).

Romana is gone, and he knows, he _knows_ , with each passing moment it will become harder to convince himself that she’s still alive. Romana is gone, Gallifrey is as good as lost, the universe is twisting in on itself, breaking apart, Leela doesn’t trust him anymore, and Narvin has never felt more alone in all his lives. 

Eventually there are no more tears left and he’s left with a hollowness in his chest, staring around this now-familiar room. All these memories, left scattered here. All these echoes. 

That familiar faint humming of the ship has changed, Narvin realizes, but none of the blaring alarms have gone off. There’s only a strange warmth that has settled around his shoulders, as if someone has gently turned up the temperature, or perhaps wrapped a blanket around him. 

His breath catches, and for once the memory is more fond than painful. For once, there is a flicker of something a little like company, a little like sympathy, even if not in any way that even a Time Lord could fully understand. But there is a hint of a presence at the corner of his mind, and tentatively, Narvin lets some of his telepathic barriers lower.

As if an electric charge is sparked under his hands, Narvin stands automatically. The ship tugs him, almost nudging him forward.

_What is it? What do you need?_

He expects the tug to lead him back to the console, for something else to have gone wrong with the circuitry. He doesn’t expect to end up outside a door that certainly didn’t exist on the ship when he and Romana left the previous day.

Quiet voices sound from within it, and Narvin closes his eyes. 

_She doesn’t want to see me. It’s best if I leave them alone._

There isn’t a response from the ship, only that same quiet sensation of warmth than earlier. Whichever way he steps, it is his choice.

Narvin should walk away. Let Leela and Rayo have their grief in peace, let them work through the tumultuous upset of their life. He is here to fix the ship and try to find if there’s any patch of the universe left that can keep them safe, not to intrude. There is too much checkered history between them now, too many grievances. Too many echoes. 

He sucks in a breath, startled and sudden. Is it just the same old excuse? The weight of all they’ve lost heavy between them, the conversations left unsaid for so long. Until they’re out of time. 

If he lets this distance remain between him and Leela, if he doesn’t at least _try_ to talk to her, _try_ to fix things, will he just be making the same mistakes? 

Leela will almost certainly send him away today. She will almost certainly blame him for a long time to come. There is so little chance of fixing anything.

Narvin raises his hand and knocks.


End file.
